Terrence Oyelaran

You leave Francis Lonetree because of the quiet. For one minute you had a monastery's worth of it, ledgers in a cold room, a scar through the eyebrow that you kept finding with your thumb, and a silence so complete you could hear your own arithmetic. It was not that he was bad. He was finished. Nothing in him wanted anything, and the wanting is yours, and it has gone back to the page with the wheel on it. So you pay. The wheel turns, and you do not decide what it hands you.

Fluorescent hum. You are crouched at an open dryer with one black sock hanging from your fingers, and the warmth of the drum is on your face like a held breath. Your thighs are loaded, a deep squat, heavy and strong, the weight sitting low in the hips. Your knees ache a little and you feel it clearly. The air smells of detergent and damp concrete. There is no travel and no warning. You were nowhere, and now the sock is in your hand.

The sock is the first thing. Cotton, still warm, and it opens something that is his and not yours: a Tuesday morning, a gray light under a raised car, a customer's brake rotor, and the pride of a job done clean. Then the shirt against your back, the gray tee, and his hands doing up its absence, because this morning he put on a blue work shirt with MALIK stitched on a patch. That is not his name here, only the shirt's, and you feel him not caring. He buttoned it from the bottom, sleeve by sleeve, cuff snapped, then the brown work pants, the belt pulled one notch past where it used to sit. He was a little ashamed of the notch, and he was a little proud of the weight he carries. It is a strong body, a wide one, built for lifting transmissions.

You reach into the drum and pull the load out warm. The rag-ends of his mother's voice come with the towels: fold it like you mean it. Your fingers know it before you do. They square the corners, snap, crease, stack, quick and exact, nothing like the eight crumpled shirts balled in the drawer upstairs, and you feel the contradiction in him, a man who is careless at home and precise with anything that touches a customer, or his mother's lessons. The beard is thin against your jaw and you rub it, and a flash arrives of him in a mirror, patient, hoping it will fill. A nose ring cold against your breath. The ear studs. A pouch of nicotine tucked in the upper lip, a small sting that steadies him. Nobody waits for him upstairs. No glass in his hand tonight, none ever. The silence of that is a choice he made, and you can feel how much he likes it.

You set the sock down and turn your hands over. They are broad, scarred only by work, steady. They are not yours, and they are warm from the dryer.

You look up and say, low, "Okay. You'll do for now."

The dryer ticks as it cools. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.