Samir Haddadin

You are standing in a stranger's kitchen in Ohio, and the refrigerator hums the same note it has hummed for forty minutes. Jalen Pruitt's body is tired in the shins. A closing shift on his feet, a clip-on name tag still pinned to the shirt on the chair. It is not the body that is wrong. He was twenty-two minutes old when you got him, and you spent twenty of them looking at the freckles in the microwave door, and the moustache, and thinking: he is fine, he is a good one, he is nothing. Nothing is not an answer to anything. The house sleeps. His mother's clock ticks down the hall. You are leaning on a counter you cannot feel the history of, and the wanting has come back already, which is faster than it should. You put his phone to the page. The wheel is a slow gray ring. You pay, and it turns.

Then your thumb moves.

It is already moving. You are on your side in the dark and the glass is six inches from your face, blue on one cheek, and the thumb is mid-flick, faster than a thumb should be, steady. The mattress sags under a hip that is heavier than the last one. The air smells of a room slept in: laundry, a dry radiator, someone else's shampoo on the far pillow. Her shape is not here. Somewhere in the apartment, water runs once in a pipe.

The pad of the thumb is rough. It catches on the screen, a callus there, and the callus gives you a van door: the roll of the cargo shutter, the rattle running up your wrist, a thousand mornings of it. A cold handle, a scanner's plastic edge. He is proud of the speed of his hands. You hold the phone and it tells you more. A photograph at the top of the feed, a girl with a gap in her teeth holding a lopsided cake, and the feeling comes up through your chest before the name does, wide and helpless and warm. His daughter. Nine. She hates the crusts. You are not his, and the ache is still real in his ribs.

Your free hand is pinned under the pillow. You draw it out and the knuckles crack on their own, one, two, three, a habit that was never yours, and the sound goes through you as a small comfort. You did not ask for it. Under the sheet the cotton of the pants clings to the calf, and you feel the old ink through the cloth, not as a picture but as a day: a chair, a buzzing needle, a younger man being brave, a friend laughing at him. The thing nobody knows about him is a cigarette. He has not had one in six years and his mouth still wants it at night, here, in the blue, and the wanting is a sweet small ghost. You almost laugh. You know that kind of wanting.

The T-shirt is soft from a hundred washes. It carries the morning he put it on, not today but some other: her hand at the small of his back in the hall, the smell of coffee, him standing at the mirror at four a.m. with the crew cut he gives himself, running the clippers across the gray, turning his head to the scar in his eyebrow and touching it, a fall off a bike in a courtyard, age eleven, his father's voice calling him in Arabic. Mass on Sundays, back pew, his knee cracking when he kneels. A few thousand dollars put away each year, never spent, for the girl. It is not a fortune. It is a wall he built with his own hands.

Your breath is slow in him. His heart is a calm engine. Everything works.

You set the phone face down on the sheet and the room goes black except the window. You raise your hand into what light is left, and turn it over. Wide palm, short nails, the creases deep as a map. A stranger's, and yours.

You look up into the dark, and your voice comes out low and roughened, his, not yours.

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."