Russell Kvamme

You are standing at a register with a line of four, and the man in front is counting out quarters onto the belt. Andre Mosley's body is good. Six-two, long in the thigh, a back that never complains. You have been him for less than a minute and already you know what it is to reach the top shelf without lifting your heels. Nothing is wrong with him.

That is the trouble. The quarters clink, and the sound goes through you like a dropped plate, and you think: this is a cashier's morning in Atlanta, the light flat and white through the glass doors, and you have already done it. You have been the man behind the counter. You know the weight of him. There is a question you keep not asking, and the wheel is the only place it gets quiet. You say "one second" to the man with the quarters, you step away, and you take out the phone.

The wheel turns under your thumb.

Wrist braces. That is the first thing. Navy neoprene, strapped snug, a brown buckle at each forearm, and your fingers are resting on small keys set close together, pressed down mid-chord. You are sitting. The chair has a lean to it. Your left leg is bouncing, a fast small tick of the heel against the carpet, and you cannot make it stop because it is not you doing it.

You were in the middle of a word. Your hands were. They did something wrong, a stumble across the keys, and then did it again slowly, right. Then the next, and the next, each one checked, as if the hands had gone suspicious of themselves.

A man is speaking somewhere above you in a flat, patient voice. Daylight comes through a tall window onto the side of your face. It is early and the room is not yet full.

The jacket first. Wool blend, a little tight across the shoulders where he has put weight on, and the sleeve cuffs drag against the braces. Memory comes up through the cloth: a closet door, the hanger, the smell of the dry cleaner's plastic. He put the gray shirt on first, left sleeve, then right, and buttoned from the bottom because the top button had always been a fight. He stood in a stucco courtyard afterward, under palms gone brittle, and drank his coffee standing up because sitting was how the leg started. A thumb ran over the bare place on his ring finger, where the band had been, pale as paper under the tan. In the picture it is still there, a slim ring. In his feeling it is gone. He does not know why he wears it for photographs.

Your hands rest on the keys. The keys give you more. A courtroom a decade ago, a woman testifying about a dog, and he typed her sobbing as *(witness crying)* and went home and could not eat. Twenty-two years of other people's worst days, sent through his fingers at two hundred words a minute and never once his to say. Under it the carpal ache, deep in the wrist, the reason for the braces. A daughter's recital, a son's cracked phone screen, a woman's voice in a kitchen saying *I can't do this anymore*, quietly, like reading a menu. A rosary in the glove box. Mass on Sundays that he does not tell the courthouse about. Money in an account he never looks at, enough that he could stop and does not, because the keys are the one place he is exact.

His body is heavy and tired and honest. The belly presses the chair. The knees complain. The mole on his cheek itches and you do not scratch it.

You lift your hands from the keys and turn them over. Wide palms, short square nails, the tan line.

You look up and say, to no one, "Read that back."

How long does a man like this last? Until the wanting comes, which could be tonight, or in four minutes, and the wrist hurts either way.