Todd Prussman

Gregory's classroom is dark and his apartment is darker, and you are sitting on the edge of his bed at three in the morning with his phone's flashlight in his teacher's hand, not his own, pointed at nothing, because sleep will not come to a body that spent all day being twenty-two teenagers' problem. You have been him less than a minute, technically, and thirty-one hours actually, and the difference between those two numbers is the whole reason you're awake. He graded forty essays on The Crucible today wearing this beauty mark, this thick forearm, this patient classroom voice you didn't build and don't own, and somewhere around essay thirty you caught yourself thinking in his handwriting. That's the tell. That's always the tell — not boredom exactly, more like a coat getting warm. You get up before you can love it. You find the site on his phone, the one you bookmarked under a dead name, and you spin because stopping is the only mistake you've never made.

The wheel gives you a sidewalk.

It gives you white glare and a hedge and the weight going out through a leg you don't know yet, mid-stride, already leaning against a retractable leash that has run to its limit. A small dog with its ears back is looking up at you like it heard something change. Your hand — his hand, now, the only hand there is — keeps the tension on the cord a half-second too long, and then winds it in twice, click click, the way a body does when it's done this ten thousand times and you have done it never. You start walking. The dog has to trot to catch the new stride.

The shirt is what opens first — gray, worn thin at the collar, and it comes with the memory of taking it off a hanger this morning, Honolulu-morning, evening-now, a wife's voice behind you saying something about the electric bill while you buttoned it one-handed, the other hand already checking your phone for a shift swap. Todd Prussman. The name arrives with the shirt, the way a return address arrives with a letter. Bartender. Nineteen years behind different versions of the same bar, currently The Mauka Room, currently the seven-to-close, currently — you feel it land with a small, familiar dread — supposed to be there in forty minutes, because Manny called in and somebody has to open the well.

The leash in your palm brings the dog itself: a name, Pretzel, a rescue his older daughter begged for and now mostly ignores, and underneath that a whole marriage arrives sideways, the way the big things always do, through the small thing holding it. Ten years married to a woman named Dawn who still, after everything, laughs at his jokes at the bar in front of customers like she's proud of him for something other than pouring drinks straight. Two kids. A house on posts that his father-in-law calls "handyman's delight" every single time he visits, like it's new. Rust coming through the tin roof in one corner over the second bedroom that Todd has been meaning to patch for three summers.

The tattoo on his arm is under the sleeve and you don't touch it directly but it's close enough to the surface that it comes anyway, warm, unwanted, generous: a name, Renata, and a date, an ex-girlfriend from before Dawn, from the Kalihi years, and the tattoo was supposed to come off but the laser place closed and he never rebooked and Dawn stopped asking about it around year six because some fights aren't worth having twice. He thinks about Renata maybe once a season, usually drunk, usually with something like relief that he didn't marry her instead.

His feet in his own shoes tell you about standing twelve hours behind a rail, the exact ache of it, both knees, the small tremor of low blood sugar he ignores more often than he should because checking it means admitting the diabetes is a whole thing and not a note in a folder. The wedding band on the hand that isn't holding the leash is thin gold, a little loose now that he's lost weight the bad way — skinny fat, gut and thin arms both, forty-three doing what forty-three does to a man who drinks like a bartender because he is one. Under it all, right now, this second, his left leg has already started bouncing at the knee even though he's standing still, a tic so old it survived the swap without you asking it to.

And there — folded into the ordinary Friday evening of it, the walk before the shift, the hedge Pretzel insists on every single time — there is the small clean fact of him: nothing unusual about him at all. Not one thing anyone would point to. A guy with a dog on a sidewalk in the smog-gold light before dark, thinning on top, tired around the eyes, thinking about the well he has to stock, the vodka he's low on, whether Dawn remembered to thaw something for the kids. A whole life sized exactly to itself, no larger, no smaller, and you are standing in the middle of all of it with his shoulders and his blood sugar and his forty minutes to be somewhere.

You look down. The hand holding the leash is thinner than the one you had an hour ago in Pittsburgh, veined, a little sun on it despite everything, gold band catching the last of the light. You turn it over once, like checking it for a wound.

"Okay," you say, to the dog, to the hedge, to nobody. "Let's go."