Toby Lankford

---

You watch him a long time before you take him.

Not because you are careful. Because he is boring, and boring is the thing you have wanted for eleven years, and you can't quite believe it's just standing there on a wet sidewalk in Nashville with its hair in the wind.

He streams three nights a week to forty-one people. Nine of them are bots. The stream is the field — always the field, the mower stripes he cut that afternoon, the empty stands going blue as the sky drains out, and him narrating it like anybody asked. *Ran the reel at three-eighths today. See that? See how it lays over?* He rolls his shoulder toward the outfield like he's introducing a sister. He's proud of the grass. He is genuinely, uncomplicatedly proud of grass, and forty-one people watch a nineteen-year-old be proud of grass, and you are one of them, night after night, from wherever you are, which is nowhere.

You learn him the way you'd learn a house you meant to move into.

He can't stand still. That's the first real thing. The hands go the whole time — thumb along the phone stand's collar, knuckle-crack, a pouch tucked up under his lip and then the fingers back down to pick at a seam on his thigh, tap the tripod leg, twist the hair off his neck and let it fall again. Skinny arms, wrists like a bird's. All that gray hair down past his shoulder blades, which he does not explain and nobody asks about, and it catches the neon off THE LONE STAR and goes pink at the ends. Green stains on the knees of his work pants. Boots gone to the shape of his feet.

He doesn't drink. Says it once, mildly, when a chatter offers to buy him a beer: *Nah, I don't. Never have.* No sermon on it. He prays before he eats, in public, with his eyes open and his mouth barely moving, and it takes four seconds and he's never once mentioned it on stream. He tells his forty-one people that God made bermudagrass to be walked on and it comes back anyway, and he means it, and it is the single most embarrassing thing you have ever loved.

He owes about twenty-four thousand dollars. You know this because he laughed about it in September — *truck's worth eight and I owe nineteen, so, y'know, math* — and then changed the subject to aeration. There's a girlfriend. Kaylee. She comes by sometimes with a drink from the gas station and he goes shy on camera, hides behind the hair. And there's the other one, the one before, whose name he stopped saying in July and who still shows up in the chat under a handle he pretends not to recognize. You watch his face when she posts. It does something small and gets shut down fast. He is nineteen and he has already learned to do that.

You have no body. You had one. That is all you'll say about it: you had one and you were in it a long time and then you were not, and what you kept was memory and wanting, and wanting with no hands is a specific hell nobody warns you about. You didn't choose him for his teeth or his money or his life. You chose him because he goes outside. Because he uses himself. Because for three hours every other evening you watched a pair of hands that could not sit still and you thought, *I would never let those sit still either.*

He is a stranger to you. He owes you nothing. That is the part you keep turning over, all through the winter of watching. You will not be avenging anything. You will not be correcting anything. You will simply take a working body off a boy who has done nothing to deserve it, and the ledger will never balance, and there is no going back and no end date, and you decided a long time ago that you were the kind of thing that could live with that.

So: Thursday, dusk, alley behind the field. Rain an hour gone, sidewalk still holding the neon in puddles. He sets the phone on the stand, gets his framing, checks the light on his face — half of it lit by the screen, the other half by the sign. Talks about overseeding. Taps the tripod. Crack of a knuckle. Someone asks about the hair and he says *it's just hair, man.*

Then he leans in to read the chat.

You have never typed anything to him. Tonight you type one line, and it is not clever, and it is not a threat. It is the thing you know he'll answer.

**you ever think about who's watching**

And he laughs, because that's a funny thing for a groundskeeper with forty-one viewers to be asked, and he squints at it, and he leans back and lifts his chin and looks straight into the lens to answer it. Straight in. Both eyes. The screen's glow lying flat across the left side of his face and his own reflection sitting somewhere behind it.

*Y'all,* he says, *ain't nobody watching—*

The stream looks back.

It comes through him the way water comes through a pipe that was always a pipe and never asked to be. His head goes back and there is light where his eyes were and light out of his open mouth, and for a second the alley has a second streetlamp in it, and the puddles have something new in them to hold. His hair lifts off his shoulders.

Then it's out, and the body drops into itself, and the phone is still live, and the chat is still scrolling, and I am standing on a sidewalk in Nashville with legs.

There's weather in the palms. Calluses like a strap across the base of the fingers, the kind you only get from a mower handle and a rake and eight hours a day of the same grip. A green smell coming off the knees of the pants. A pouch under the lip that stings, and a heart going fast because his heart was already going fast — the hands were mid-fidget when I arrived and they are still moving, still going, thumb to knuckle, and I did not tell them to do that, and I let them do it anyway, because that is his and I am keeping it.

I turn the hand over. Look at the lines in it. Nineteen years of somebody's grip.

Forty-one people are watching. Nine of them are bots.

I lift my eyes off the hand and into the lens and I say the only true thing I have.