Russell Kowalczyk

You are tired of Efraín Camacho's eye. That is the honest start of it. The lazy one drifts toward the window while you talk to the foreman, and for the whole of the minute you have worn him, people have looked at the wrong side of your face. You are standing in a Los Angeles driveway with his keys in his heavy fist. His knees ache from stairs. The wanting comes up through all of it, and you go back to the page with the wheel. You do not call it a reason. You press the button.

The kitchen arrives mid-motion. A mug is in your hands, warm through the stoneware, and your thumbs are wrapped around it as if they had been there for years. The light is yellow and low, from a lamp by the sink. A dog bowl sits by the door. The coats on the hooks are somebody's.

You are tall. The ceiling feels near. Your left leg is bouncing, and you did not tell it to. Your heel taps the tile in a quick small rhythm, and you let it.

Your body does the next thing before you do. It sets the mug down inside a pale ring on the counter, where the mug has sat before. It crosses to a drawer, the third, and takes out a spoon at the first try, with no looking. You stand there holding a spoon you have no use for.

The flannel is soft, worn thin at the cuffs, and it touches the inside of your wrists. A flash comes up, and it is his feeling. A morning with the light still gray, sitting on the edge of a bed, rolling these cuffs up one turn and then another because the trench gets hot by ten. A woman's voice in the next room says *you're taking the blue one again*, and he is glad, ridiculously glad, to be known that well.

The ring on your left hand is plain and a little loose from the cold. You turn it with your thumb. A kitchen, a different one, a woman laughing with her hand over her mouth because he has burned the eggs. A small, steady tenderness comes with it, like warm water. You did not earn it. It goes through you anyway.

The jeans are stiff at the knee with dried clay. Under your boots there is a thin grit on the tile, and that opens the day. Heat standing in the trench like a wall. The mini excavator ticking as it cooled. The spoil heaped higher than his shoulder, and a shovel with a handle worn smooth where his hands go. His lower back is complaining now, a low hot line above the belt. Forty-two years sit in it. His shoulders are strong, though, and his forearms are corded and ready. Your hands know how to hold weight, and they are asking for some.

On your upper arm the sleeve rides up over black ink, a tribal curl. You do not look. His feeling about it is only a faint old embarrassment, a bad idea at nineteen that he kept anyway.

You walk down the hallway and you are turning lights on ahead of you. You do not remember deciding to. Each switch is a small click under your palm. The house is not even his, and something in him knows the way anyway.

The dog is not here. Its bowl is full. You feel that, a small worry that is not yours, and it is the first thing of his that has made your throat tighten.

You lift your hands into the lamplight. Square fingers, a ridge of callus, the ring. You turn them over. They are warm and entirely there.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected, gravel in it. "Okay. You'll do."

Somewhere the page is still open, with its wheel, and the question is already sitting in your chest. How long is this one? You can feel the wanting, a long way down, asleep.

HOOK: He sets the mug down like a man who lives here.