Stephen Dombrowski

You are Caleb Rutledge for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is twenty-five and he is hollow. The hours are good, the machine is good, and the house at this hour is dead quiet, a Tuesday in Houston with everyone asleep. You stand in his kitchen with his big, uncomplaining hands flat on the counter and wait to feel anything. Nothing comes. Nothing has come since the first second, when you were sure it would. His beard is thick and his shoulders are sound, and you could run a track hoe all day in this body and never once be surprised by it. You wanted to be surprised. You open the page on his phone. The wheel is already turning, and you let it.

Dark. A mattress under your hip, the whole length of one side, and a pillow gone warm beneath your cheek. A glow six inches from your face. Your thumb has stopped mid-scroll, and it starts again, steady, flicking past everything he had paused on.

The blanket is heavy on your legs. Your right leg wants to bounce even lying down, and you let it. The T-shirt is thin and soft, washed to nothing, and when it shifts against your ribs a flash comes. His hands pulling it off the hook behind the bathroom door, because it was the one that did not smell like anything. You have not been him long enough to know that this was a good day, only that he put it on after the third interview that went nowhere. He stood at the mirror and ran a palm over his scalp, a habit from the years he first shaved it, when he still believed it was a decision.

The phone is cold glass. His thumb knows the cracked corner. The flash comes: a hallway, a small voice, a door that closes slowly. A child. Not yours, and not something you can hold, but his chest tightens as if it were. The girl is nine and lives with her mother across the city, and every other weekend he is a person for forty hours. The feeling arrives before the image and stays after it.

You look at the ring finger. The skin is paler there, a band of it, and when your thumb finds it the memory is a kitchen and a voice that was not angry, which was worse. Dana saying it was like living beside a closed door. He had not been drinking that night. He had been drinking for months, and she knew the difference. You feel the weight of the glass he did not put down.

The mattress is his, and so is the ache under it. His lower back has a hot, stubborn knot from the kitchen chair. Hours at the laptop, listings, a cover letter for a job he would not have wanted at thirty. Forty-two years in here: soft in the middle, thin in the arms, sour in the knee. The savings are a number he checks the way other men touch a bruise. It is enough for a while, and "a while" frightens him more than none.

Your leg bounces. It is the only part of him that sounds sure of anything.

Then your hand, lifted into the blue light. You turn it over. The pale band, the plain palm, the fingers that are not the ones you carried a minute ago. You look up, past the glow, into the dark.

"Well," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Hello, you."

And under it the question, quiet as the leg: how long does this one hold, before the hollow comes back to find you?