Russell Tennant

You are Elias Haddad for less than a minute, and already he is wrong in your mouth. The fat sits on him like a coat he'd never take off. The knees complain. In New York the window shows a Tuesday going blue, and the engineering reports on his laptop are all of them yours now, all of them solved. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. He is simply the man who answered the first thing you ever wanted, and what you want tonight is not answered. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb, his thumb, is steady.

Then the sink.

Foam on your lip. The tap is running, cold across the knuckles of your right hand, which rests on the faucet handle. The brush stops mid-stroke. You start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because the molars are where the day collects. Your left hand grips the porcelain, and the ring on it clicks once against the rim.

Your leg is bouncing. It was bouncing before you came, and it does not care that you did.

The pajama top is soft, washed to nothing, and it opens the first door. A woman's hands, years ago, buttoning the placket of a shirt like this one on a boy who is not him but is his son, and the pride in it, thick as a hymn. Then the morning he put these on: the left sleeve first, because his shoulder aches, and he stood at the end of the bed a while. The room was quiet. His wife was breathing on her side. He was not thinking of her. He was thinking of the other one, the recent one, who called him a coward in a parking lot in a voice so gentle it was worse. He carries that like a stone in the shoe. He pays for it with two bourbons most evenings, and tonight the glass is already rinsed and upside down on the drainboard.

The tile under your feet is cold and gritty with grains of sand. Beach sand, always, in Miami, in every house, and it brings a Sunday: a white church, the pew's varnish sticking to the back of his thighs, three grown children in a row, his wife's hymnal open, her thumb marking the verse. He loves her. Both things are true in him and he has never once said so aloud.

The wedding band is warm from the water. It is too loose now. He has gotten thin, and he knows this, and the ring has slid and turned on his finger more than once this year while he lay awake.

You rinse. Twice. Gray water down the drain. You stand the brush bristles-up, out of the cup it has always sat in, and it feels like a small, correct crime.

You lift your left hand. The skin is thin over the tendons, freckled, the band pale on the finger. You turn it over. Palm, lines, a callus from nothing, from decades of holding. Then you look into the mirror, at the cleft in the chin, the brown eyes that are not afraid.

"Hello," you say, in a voice with Miami in it.

The leg keeps bouncing. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether tomorrow you will still be him.