Tanner Wade Kowalski

The first thing I do is stand in Darnell's kitchen in the dark with his hand flat on the cold refrigerator door. I have been him for four minutes. He is thirty-three, and his knees ache from a day of lifting. The house is asleep. The only sound is the compressor kicking on, and in his chest there is a slow tiredness that has nothing to do with the hour.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. I came out of the site's first flash into a body that works, and I keep waiting to want to stay in it. He has a goatee and a beauty mark I can feel when I frown. His phone is lit on the counter, and the wheel is on it, patient as a stove burner. I think about every other man out there awake in some other evening. I am not unhappy. I only notice that I am still hungry, and I do not say that to anyone, including myself. I press the button.

Then the sidewalk is under me and the night is wide and cold.

A hedge is at my left shoulder, wet-smelling and green. Something tugs at my right hand, and I am holding a plastic leash handle with the thumb on a lock button. The dog is nose-deep in the leaves at the end of the line. I have stopped walking mid-stride, and my weight is on my left foot. The sky is huge and black and the air tastes like cut wheat, a little like rain that has not arrived.

The dog looks up. Its ears go back flat. It knows, as dogs do, and I can't say anything to it. I wind the leash twice around my hand, and the plastic handle clicks.

Then the memories come, through what I touch.

The hoodie first. The cuffs are worn soft, and the zipper pull is cold against my knuckle. I feel the morning he pulled it on, half-asleep, after a shift that ended past midnight. The shift is why the street is empty, and why he walks the dog now instead of sleeping. His girlfriend had left the porch light on for him. She had said, *take the hoodie, it's cold,* and he did not answer, because he was thinking about the grease. Sleeve by sleeve the arms went in, the left cuff caught on his wristwatch, and he tugged it free.

The leash handle. It hums in my palm with the dog's pulling, and suddenly I know her name is Biscuit, though she is not what anyone would call a biscuit, and he got her from a lot behind a church where a woman was giving away a litter. He knelt in gravel to take her. She peed on his shoe, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down. His whole chest warms with it. That feeling is his, not mine, and I have no use for it, and it won't leave.

My fingers want to crack. The knuckles go one by one under my thumb before I decide anything, and a small pop runs up my wrist. He has done this at every register and at every stoplight, and in the church pew while the priest said the Lord's Prayer, and his mother used to slap his hand for it.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. In the back pocket there is a small round tin, and when I press it through the cloth I taste mint and a burn along the gum. The pouches. He quit them twice. He is lying to the girlfriend about the third time, and it sits in him like a swallowed stone.

The studs in my ears are small and cold. I touch one and see a bathroom mirror, a friend's hand, a dare at nineteen, and the sting that was nothing.

The fry station comes up through the smell on his clothes: oil in the fibers, the baskets rising out of the vat in a shiver of gold, the timer's scream, the burn scar-less forearm he holds out of the spray out of habit. Twelve-hour days, a headset that pinches his ear. The manager's voice. A balance in the bank he keeps in his head like a prayer, and it is not much.

Under all of it the body is plain and true. Five-ten, a lean back, soles sore from standing on tile. A crew cut that prickles my palm when I rub it. Stubble rough on my jaw. His lungs are good. His feet want to go.

I lift my right hand into the streetlight and turn it over. Dry skin, a nick on the thumb, a stranger's life in every line. The dog watches me. Then I look up, past the hedge, into the dark.

"Come on, Biscuit," I say, in a voice that is not mine yet. "Let's see how far this goes."

I start walking, and she learns my stride. I wonder, with the leash biting my wrist, how long before the hunger comes back.