Shane Pellerin

You are standing in a kitchen in Ohio with a cold cup of coffee, and the man you are wearing has a bad left knee that talks every time he shifts his weight. Walter Beaverson. Sixty-two. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know the thing you cannot use: his hands shake at the edge of the morning, a fine tremor in the fingers that makes the spoon ring against the cup. You wanted a steady pair. The black hair, the freckles on his forearms, the short legs: all of it is fine, it is simply not enough. Out the window a neighbor's porch light is still on and nothing is moving. Nobody is awake to see you decide. You set the cup down and it chatters against the saucer, and that settles it.

The page with the wheel opens. The wheel turns.

Then the kitchen is gone and the dark is warm and you are face-down. Your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone damp with breath. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it; it is a heavy, pins-and-needles weight. A thin stripe of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheets. Your breath is ragged, then it is not. You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold themselves at your chest, a posture this body has never once slept in.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. The black cotton is stiff under the arms, and when your fingers pluck at the hem it comes back to you: a hand at a small mirror, a thumb working a button, the same shirt pulled on in the dark of an earlier evening because the washing was not done. Underneath the feeling is tiredness so old it has a grain. Then the sheet, rough and cheap, hotel-thin. He has slept on this kind of sheet for a year, and a lease ended somewhere, and a girlfriend's name sits just out of reach, warm, with a laugh in it.

Your thumb finds something on the nightstand without your asking: a lighter. It is cheap and plastic, and the wheel of it bites. Your thumb flips it, flips it, flips it, and the habit opens a door. A loading dock at night, cold coming off the concrete, smoke going up in a long thread, a pack a day crushed soft in a pocket. The line he runs, plastic spooling out of the die in a hot bright ribbon, the smell of it sweet and chemical in the back of his throat. Earplugs, orange, swinging at his collar. A rolled sleeve. The knowledge of how to catch a jam before it forms, in the wrists, not the head.

The keys beside the lighter are cold and jangle. A prayer mat, folded in a corner of some other room, and the quiet pride of a man who has never touched a drink, not once, not even to be polite. A little money put away, counted like a held breath. His lungs rattle faintly. His jaw is rough with two days of stubble, and your tongue finds the dry mouth and the taste of tobacco. The skull under your palm is bare and smooth. The chin has its deep cleft, and your fingertip falls into it as if it had been there before.

You lift your hands into the stripe of light. Calluses ridge the palms. The knuckles are cracked from weather and work. They are steady. You turn them over, and then you look up.

"Well," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Hello, Shane."

The lighter is still warm. Somewhere under the quiet is the question you never ask out loud, how long, and the wanting that has not come back yet.