Todd Amaral

Eight minutes in Kalani's body and already the welder's hands feel wrong on you, too small, too quick, still humming from a bead he laid an hour ago that you didn't ask to remember. You're standing in his garage in the flat white glare, breathing his easy lungs, and it isn't enough. It was never going to be enough — eight minutes was always going to be the whole appetite, because the wanting isn't for a body, it's for the drop, the half-second before the wheel stops and you don't know yet who you get to not be. You wipe his palms on his jeans, an old tic that isn't yours, and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, and you spin, because that's the whole of the reason and it was always going to be.

The hold music loops back to its first bar — trombones, a little tinny — and the shoulder it's wedged against isn't the same shoulder. It drops, heavy and sure of the catch, and the phone lands in a hand that is broad and thick-fingered and already closing around it like it's done this ten thousand times. The pen stops on the second digit of a reference number, 4-7, and does not finish the 7. There is red dirt light coming low through louvered windows. There is a lot of him to be inside of, suddenly, all at once, weight down through the heels, a low ache low in the back that has opinions about standing at counters.

The shirt gets you first. Cotton, worn soft, a Hawaiian print gone gray-blue with washing, and it comes with the whole morning still folded into it: him buttoning it one-handed in front of the closet mirror while the baby fussed down the hall and Kai — his husband, the name arrives with the smell of the shirt's collar, some drugstore cologne Kai bought him because he liked the bottle — hollered that he'd get her, go, you'll be late. The shorts next, khaki, a little tight at the waist this year, and pulling them on this morning he'd caught his own reflection and thought, not unkindly, *heavier than last summer*, and let it go, because he mostly likes himself, in the plain unbothered way of a man who has done the work of liking himself with a professional's help and doesn't examine it further than that.

The counter under his forearms gives up the pharmacy — not this morning's, but every morning's, twelve years of them stacked into the granite like sediment. The particular hush of the place after the lunch rush. The amber wall of bottles behind him he could find blind. A woman crying once about a co-pay and him coming around the counter, which pharmacists aren't supposed to do, and putting a hand on her shoulder anyway. He is good at his job in the unglamorous way of someone who has simply shown up correctly for over a decade, and it has paid for the house on posts with its bad roof he keeps saying he'll fix, and it lets him not think too hard about money, which he likes.

The envelope under his other hand is the insurance company, again, about Mele's ear tubes, and the tattoo on his inner forearm — swallow and banner, faded now, done at twenty-two in a shop two blocks from here with a friend who's dead now, car accident, and that grief comes up fast and specific and gone again like a wave receding — brushes the counter's edge and gives him back the ache of Kai's hand tracing that same tattoo in bed two nights ago, half-asleep, saying *you should get it touched up*, and him saying *nah, I like it faded*, meaning: I like being who I was too.

There is a girl before Kai. Six years gone now, then briefly, humiliatingly, current again — a text from her three weeks ago that he hasn't told Kai about, not because it's anything, but because explaining why it isn't anything felt harder than not explaining. The wedding band on his left hand is warm from his own skin and it tells him, plainly and without drama, that this is the part of his life he built on purpose, and the ex is the part he's still deciding what to do with the memory of. Both true. Neither urgent. The hold music loops again, tinny trombones, insistent.

His body around all of this: heavy through the shoulders and gut in the specific way of a big man who used to play line and never entirely stopped eating like he still does, feet flat and a little sore from a full shift standing, the low steady thrum under the sternum that is his anxiety on a good day, medicated down to background noise, present the way tinnitus is present. Barefoot on the kitchen floor. Warm. Alive in a way that has weight to it, the way a small quick body isn't.

You look down at the hand still holding the pen, and it is enormous, freckleless, a stranger's hand wearing a ring that means something you didn't earn. You turn it over once, slow, watching the fingers do it the way they've done it every day of his life without being told.

"Whoever's there," you say into the dead hold line, to no one, "hang on a sec," and you don't hang up, and you don't know how long you'll be the one holding.