Stanley Dziedzic

You are standing in a garage in Las Vegas with a wrench in a hand that is not yours anymore, or will not be in a minute. Terrence Oakley's forearms ache the good way. The silver in his beard is wet with the sweat of a man who has been under a truck all night. You wanted this body. You found out what it could do. It could lift an engine block and it could not sit still, and every time you sat on the stool by the bay door, his knees began to want something you could not name.

That is not the reason. The reason is a Pittsburgh brother, Frank's brother, the short bearded man with the freckles, whose phone you still have in your pocket, nine spins old and a minute stale. You left him in the middle of a kitchen. Frank had called, and you answered in that voice, and Frank said, "Hey, Stosh," and you knew everything about the way he said it. You could not say anything back. You hung up. You are spinning again, in Terrence's garage with the radio off, because something you will not say out loud is still sitting in your throat like a swallowed coin.

The wheel clicks. The wrench is gone.

You are on your stomach. Dark. A pillow smells of someone else's scalp. Your arm hangs off the mattress into cold air, and your mouth is dry with a night of breathing through it. Behind the curtains a streetlight leaks orange through the gap. Your breath is ragged, and then it is even, and you are the one making it even. You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold at your chest, on their own, neat as a body laid out. He has never slept like this. The mattress dips with a weight you do not know yet. His belly rises under a gray T-shirt, soft and warm.

Then the shirt, under your fingertips, gives you a morning. The navy polo, not this gray one. He is in a glass-walled office with the door open and it is Thursday. He drums his fingers on the desk, and a man named Gary is explaining a schedule. He hates the schedule. He likes the lanyard, the little white badge clipped to the belt loop, because it means somebody trusts him with keys. You feel the cotton of the sleeves going over his forearms, the khakis stiff from the dryer, the belt tongue sliding into the worn hole. Somebody in the next room laughs. His girlfriend. She says, "You're going to be late, Stan," and he says, "I'm the one who decides that," and he is smiling, and the gap in his front teeth whistles the *s* in *decides*.

The sheet against your calves gives you the trailer: sagebrush to the step, the blue hard shadows at noon, the single-wide ticking as it cools. A church parking lot, folding chairs, his mother's hymnal with the cracked spine. A drink or two most evenings, the glass cold and the first swallow the best part of the day. A vape, passed around behind a barbecue, somebody's wedding. And under the pillow, a phone. You touch it. A woman who is not the girlfriend. An old ex, a name that still lights in his chest like a pilot flame. He never deleted her. He has never called.

Your fingers are drumming on your sternum. You did not tell them to.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and look at them. Thick, pale, the nails clipped square. You turn them over. You open them and close them. Then you look up at the dark ceiling and say, out loud, in a voice with a little rasp and a whistle in it, "Hello, Stan."

Nobody answers. The air conditioner ticks. You wonder how long the mattress will hold you, and whether the wanting comes back by morning, or in four minutes.