Silas Warren Hightower

You are standing in Russell Aldous's kitchen with the phone face-down on the counter, and the thing you cannot get past is the knee. Four minutes in him and it clicked on the stairs, a small wet pop, a flare of heat behind the cap. He is forty-seven. He has been forty-seven the whole time and you only just felt it. You rub your shaved head, the stubble like fine sandpaper, and you know the answer already: he is a man who goes to bed at ten and wakes up at five and lines things up in rows. The quiet in his house is the quiet of a man with nothing to want. You want something. You don't know what. You open the page with the wheel on it, and the ticking starts under your thumb.

Then the floor goes out and the mattress comes up.

Heat. Heavy summer air pressed against a window unit that has quit. A sheet damp under your cheek, your face turned sideways into a pillow, one arm hanging off the edge with the blood gone sleepy in it. Your breath is ragged, then it is not; you make it even. The arm comes up on its own and you roll onto your back, and your hands fold on your chest. A streetlight pushes a thin blade through the curtains onto the ceiling. Everyone in the house is asleep. Somewhere a sprinkler ticks.

You lie there and the body tells you things unasked. Long. Too long for the bed, shins past the edge. Hips tight, a dancer's tight, a deep grind in the left one that wants to be turned out and warmed. Feet sore in a specific, honest way: a ridge of callus along each big toe, a split in one heel. Your jaw is smooth. You lift a hand to your face and your fingertip finds the cleft in the chin, a deep dent, and the hand keeps going, without asking, up over your scalp where hair is parted, a habit that smooths nothing.

Your fingers find a braid. The weave is loose from sleep, and the touch opens something: a woman's hands behind his head in a kitchen, her thumbs pressing the plait flat, laughing, saying hold still, Silas, you're all elbows. He loved her. He still does, in the low, unspoken way, and the feeling sits in your chest with a name you don't know. The braid is his mother's way, or her mother's; his grandmother taught him on a porch, three strands, over and under, and the white half of him learned it from the Cherokee half, the way he learned most things, by watching hands.

The sheet under you is old cotton, soft as a rag. Your heel finds the shirt he wore today lying on the floor, and the memory lifts you: the morning, the rehearsal bag, pulling the gray tank over his head, the leg warmers dragged up over his calves, the tape wound between his toes, round and round, the small ritual before the barre. Eight hours at the mirror wall with the same eight counts. The ache of a lift that wouldn't land. A choreographer's voice: again. He never drinks; he stood at the party holding seltzer and let them laugh. The money in his account is small and careful, saved a hundred at a time, his fear of the day the knees quit.

You breathe. His lungs are enormous and easy, a young man's, thirty-three, nothing in them to resent. Nothing in the knees, no pop on the stairs. The ceiling light trembles. You take your hands off your chest and hold them up in the streetlight blade, and turn them over, palm, back, palm. Calluses at the base of each finger. A strong, strange pair.

You sit up. The braids swing forward against your collarbones. You look into the dark of the room and say, quietly, "Let's see how long you last."