Travis Hollander

You are standing in a dark kitchen in Las Vegas with the refrigerator humming and a mop bucket you did not empty, and you know why you are here. Dennis Kowalczyk's knees tell you. They have talked all night, the left one worst, a wet gravel noise when you take the stairs. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you have found the end of him. He cannot get through a shift without sitting down on an upturned bucket. Forty-seven years of other people's floors are in his back. Nobody in this building is awake, and the whole place smells of lemon cleaner and old coffee. You did not want a man who was tired. You wanted a man who could run. The phone is warm in his hand, the wheel is already turning, and you let it.

Cold. First that, a clean edge of cold in the lungs, then the ground arriving under one foot while the other is still in the air. Your pace breaks. Two steps of stumble that never land, and the running goes on from the other foot, your arms lower than his were, your head still. Breath smokes out in front of you. Water is on your left, flat and steaming, and gravel is under the shoes. An earbud hums in one ear. A watch buzzes on your wrist with a split you never ran.

The hoodie is the first thing that talks. The zipper tab bumps your breastbone, and then you are in a bedroom with the lamp off, his hands finding this sweatshirt on the chair by feel so the sound will not wake her. A wife, a shape under the quilt who sighs and does not wake. Gratitude, plain as bread. The sweatpants come next, soft at the knee, and with them the two kids' shoes lined up by the door, and him stepping over them in the dark. He laced these gray sneakers sitting on the bottom stair. His thumbs know the double knot.

The body underneath is heavier than the wheel's last gift and it is strong in a way you can use. The belly shifts with each stride and the thighs push and the lungs burn clean. Forty years old, the hamstrings pulled tight like wire, the heart going steady at mile four, which is more than Dennis ever had. The scalp is cold where the hair is thin on top. Your jaw is smooth. He shaved before he left, a habit.

Your right hand drifts to your left and the thumbnail finds a cuticle, picks. The band on the ring finger is warm. It opens something. A church basement, folding chairs, his wife laughing at a potluck, and under that something he tells nobody: a girl he dated before, a recent ex, a text he did not answer last Thursday and keeps rereading. The shame in it is his, sour and small. The glass-walled office with its door open, the quarterly numbers, a man named Doyle he has to be kind to. A water tower on the horizon he runs toward every morning because it tells him how far is left.

The watch buzzes again. You slow. You hold up your hand, the thumb bleeding a little at the nail, and turn it over in the gray light.

Then you look up at the water and the first orange edge of the sky and say, out loud, to nobody, "Okay. Let's see how far you go." Behind it is the other question, the quiet one that never leaves: how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be this man when the sun is up.