Tevita Faleolo

You are standing in the cab of Glenn Pruitt's life, and Glenn Pruitt is tired of it. Fifty-three years of knees. The truck's seat has shaped his lower back into a question mark, and the beard itches whenever you lie still. You lie in his bed in the middle of the night with his wife's breathing on the other side of the dark, and you realize you do not want any of it. You want a different weight, so you go to the phone and the page with the wheel on it. His thumb is steady. It is the only part of him that is.

The wheel clicks and the room goes white.

Now you are sunk. The couch has you by the hips and the seat of your pants, soft and low. Light moves on your face, blue and then gold, and a remote lies loose in your right hand. The show cuts to a bright frame. You sit up straight, and the remote goes down on the couch arm. Your breath is slow and wide in a bigger chest than you left. The room is dark except for one lamp and the screen. On the screen someone says something that must be funny, and you do not laugh.

Then the couch gives you things. The fabric under your palm is nubbed and warm, and it hands you a Sunday: a girl's head on your thigh, her hair smelling of coconut oil, the same TV, a different year. Your mouth tastes of her laughing. You feel it as his, a plain ache with no name yet. Then the remote's rubber buttons are worn smooth where his thumb lives, and you get the recent ex, a doorway and a box of her sweaters. He carried it down the steep driveway himself and set it in her car, and he did not say what he wanted to say. You know his silence from the inside, and it is heavy.

The shirt is black cotton, thin at the collar, and it carries the morning. His hands pull it over his head in a dark room before the shift. The work shirt hangs on the nail, navy, sleeves rolled twice. He wears the grey cut-proof sleeves up the forearms, and he sets the glasses on his nose. A door panel comes down the line and he seats the gun on the bolt, and the vibration runs up his wrist, the same eight bolts, ten thousand times. The sound lives in his teeth. He is good at it, and his hands know it without asking.

Your thumb finds the edge of the nail and your teeth are already there. You taste the old habit, the torn skin, the salt. Your tongue finds the ring in your lip, cool metal, a small click against the teeth. It was a dare once and then it stayed, and he turns it when he is thinking. Your chin is split by that deep cleft, and a thumb run across it feels like a thumbprint in clay. Under the couch your socked feet press the carpet. Rosary beads on the table, wound around a mug, bring a grandmother's kitchen and a Mass, and the girlfriend's number waiting in the phone beside them. His knees are fine and his lower back is not. His belly rests warm on his thighs, and he is thirty and strong and weary and kind.

Nobody told him it was coming, and nothing in him stayed to know.

You lift both hands into the light. They are broad and short-fingered, and the nails are bitten to the quick. You turn them over, palms, knuckles, a pale line of old grease in the creases. They are yours now. You look up at the dark screen's reflection, at a face with a split chin, and you say, quietly, to it:

"Hello, Tevita."

The lamp hums. Somewhere under the floor a car passes on the hill. You wonder how long this one holds, whether the wanting will come back by morning or in four minutes. His thumb is already at his mouth.