Samir Haddadin

Wade Kessler's knees are the problem. You are standing in a kitchen in Los Angeles before the light, in a body that is fifty and athletic and blue-eyed, and you have been him for less than a minute. The knees are fine. The problem is that nobody has ever once been tired in him. The coffee is hot, the scar through the eyebrow itches the way scars do, and you feel the whole easy machine of him humming, and it is like eating something with no salt. He is a rancher. He is good at being tall. You wanted something that had been worn down by something, and he has never been worn by anything. The phone is already in your hand, and the wheel is already open.

You pay. It turns.

The cold hits first, damp concrete cold, coming up through the soles. Then the hum: a fluorescent tube overhead, steady, a little sick in its note. You are crouched. Your thighs are folded under a belly that rests against them, and one sock is in your right hand, still warm and a little damp at the toe. The dryer door hangs open at your shoulder and breathes lint and heat on your face. Your breath comes short and low. Fifty-six years sit in the lower back like a bag of wet sand.

You are very close to the ground. Everything is close. The basket is at your knee, the detergent jug at your elbow.

Then the things start to speak.

The plaid flannel is soft at the elbows and has been washed a thousand times. Its sleeves come back as a morning, his morning: the left cuff first, a button done up blind, thick fingers that know it. Then the black tee, then the vest on the hook by the door at work, his name on a tag, the price gun in its pocket. He put the shirt on in the dark so as not to wake her. She turned over and said something into the pillow, and the tenderness in it is his, and it fills your chest like warm water.

The sock is black, ribbed, thin at the heel. Under your thumb it gives you his younger daughter, holding one up and laughing that he always lost the other. He has lost so many. Behind that, quieter, comes something he never says: the second phone number, the recent ex-girlfriend, a coffee that ended in a parking lot with nothing touched. It sits in him like a stone swallowed years ago. It is shame, and it is also longing, and he has never settled which.

Your right hand moves on its own. The thumb finds a lighter in the pocket of the trousers, a cheap one, and flips it open and shut, open and shut. He does not smoke. He never did. His father did, in a kitchen in a city that is not this one, and the small steel click is how his hand keeps its father near. You feel the grief of it, plain and old.

The ring on the left hand is warm and a little tight. The nose, when you breathe through it, whistles faintly on one side. A crooked bridge, a fall, a boy, a schoolyard. The trousers are stiff with grease at the thigh. The sock in your hand is a pair-less one, and the pair is somewhere in the dryer.

You are short. You are heavy. You are the opposite of the man you left.

You lift your hand and turn it over, the broad palm, the wedding band, the dark hair on the knuckles. It is yours now. You look up at the tube of white light and then straight ahead.

"Alright," you say, low, in a voice that is gravel and kindness. "Let's see how long you last."

Already, far down, something small is asking whether this is the one that stays until tomorrow.