Terrell Hargrove

Raymond's back hurts in the way a landscaper's does, low and honest, and I stand in the dark of his kitchen with a glass of water I haven't drunk. He is thirty-seven and short and built like a fence post. The house is asleep. His truck keys are on the hook, and even they carry something I did not ask for: a Saturday, a hose, a client's dog. Three minutes of him, and I already know what is wrong. Nothing. He works. He is fine. Fine is the thing I cannot stand in him. His life closes around me like a hand around a coin, and somewhere past the wall a woman turns over in her sleep, and she is not mine. I open the page. The wheel is already there, waiting, patient as a pulse.

I spin.

The floor changes first. Concrete, cold coming up through boot soles. The rhythm of the job is in my arms before I am: I am reaching, turning, the pallet jack's handle in my right glove, and my hand does the motion wrong. Half a second. A box lands crooked. I stop and do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, and I check each one. The air is wet iron and cardboard and cold diesel, and through the open dock door the sky hangs low and gray over brick houses.

His things begin to talk.

The glove first, stiff at the knuckles, the leather gone to the shape of his grip. Through it: a boy of nineteen on his first day, a supervisor saying keep your back straight, and the pride of being handed a pair of gloves that were really his. Then the vest, orange and rough, and under it the hoodie, its cuffs frayed soft. The shirt arrives sleeve by sleeve. This morning, in the dark, in a bedroom where a girl was still asleep, he pulled the hoodie over his head, left arm, right arm, the zipper catching halfway as it always does. He stood a moment looking at her shoulder under the blanket. Another phone sat dark on the dresser, one he doesn't answer, an ex he still thinks about on the drive in. There is money owed, a weight under everything, more than he makes in a year. He feels it as a cold hand on the back of his neck. He drinks a drink or two most evenings to loosen it.

The boots are heavy, wet at the toe. Through them comes the long walk from a bus stop in winter, his father's voice saying a man shows up. The wall of the dock presses against my shoulder and gives me a laugh in the break room, a coworker's joke, his gold tooth flashing in a reflection of the microwave door. I run my tongue over it. Smooth, strange, mine now.

His body is twenty-one and strong. His thighs hum. His shoulders are warm and tight, his lungs deep, the beard coarse under my chin when I swallow. Nothing hurts. It is the first body in a while that I could pour myself into like water.

I lift my hands and look at them. Gloved, dusty, dark at the fingertips. I peel one glove off and turn the hand over, the palm callused and wide, the lines of it nobody's I know.

I look up, toward the gray daylight and the brick street, and say out loud, in a voice lower than I expected, "Okay. Okay, Terrell."

The wheel is still there at the back of my mind, quiet. I don't know how long this one lasts.