Terrance Beaumont

You have been Colin Reuther for one minute, and already you know what's wrong with him.

He is cold. The truck's back door is propped open on a San Francisco street still blue before dawn, and the air comes in wet and tastes of the bay. Your arms are thin and your beard is patchy under your fingers. Your stomach is loud. The flat-top is not even lit. He has the whole prep list in his head, and under it a small bright dread, a sense of being twenty-two and behind. You stand with a bag of onions against your hip and know you cannot do this. It's not that it's hard. You carry nothing in here that wants to be carried. You came for weight, and he is paper.

You wipe your palm on his apron. You pull up the site on his cracked phone, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the bench.

The cold goes out of you and the heat comes in at once, thick and salted. Concrete under your boots. A fan somewhere pushes air that has already been breathed. You are sitting with your forearms on your knees and your fingers laced, and your breath comes through your teeth in a long hiss, the way a man breathes who has been counting. A bottle sweats on the floor beside your shoe. Your thighs are heavy and warm. Your chest rises further than Colin's ever did, and it feels like being given a bigger room.

You stand. The bar is above you in its rack. Your hands go up to it on their own, two inches wider than they should, and the knurling bites the pads of your fingers.

The shirt is damp across the shoulder blades, and it opens something. A dark gray tee, washed soft, and a morning: his thumb hooking the collar, the closet door that sticks, a daughter's drawing on the fridge held up by a magnet shaped like a lime. He pulled it over his head in the kitchen, fast, because the coffee was going cold and he was happy about nothing. The jeans come next, the left knee gone thin. He never lets them go to the wash. They smell like the cooler at work, onions and cold steel, and the knife roll hangs on a hook in a place you can nearly see. The bar's grip gives you a smaller flash. A woman's laugh in a parking lot years ago, her hand flat on his chest, and the ache of it, which isn't yours, settles under his ribs and stays there. Then the daughter again, asleep in the back seat with her mouth open, and he drives the long way home so she can finish.

The reps come slow, and your body knows exactly how. The shoulders burn clean. The tattoo on your right arm pulls with each pull of the muscle under it. Your face does nothing at all.

You set the bar down and look at your hands. Broad, scarred across the knuckles by nothing you can name. You turn them over.

You look up, into the mirror's gray light, and say, quietly, "Okay. You're heavy."

Somewhere under the weight the wanting is already stirring. It might be hours. It might be before you finish this set.