Travis Holloway

You are leaving Curtis Voth because of the pencil.

It is a Tuesday, noon-bright, and you are standing at the back of a classroom in Western Kansas with a boy's worksheet in Curtis's freckled hand. The boy has done the problem right. He has done it right in a way Curtis cannot follow, and Curtis's mouth has said "good, good" three times, warm and empty, while his thumb rubs the goatee he has worn since 2009. Nothing is wrong with him. His knees are soft, his belly sits easy over his belt, and the whole day tastes of cafeteria coffee. You have been him for less than a minute, and the minute is enough. He is a room with the lights left on. You think of the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb is already moving, and you do not say why, even to yourself.

Then you are standing, and it is a different weight on a different floor.

Your fingers are pinching a drawstring. The cord is slick and cheap, and you are halfway through threading it, and something has gone wrong with the motion. You did it wrong. You do it again slowly, and it is right. Then you check it, and check it again, as if the cord might lie to you. Big light on your left. A gym, tall windows, a pickup in a driveway beyond the glass. The mat is under your sneakers, giving a little, rubbery, faintly sour.

Then his things start to talk.

The hoodie is soft and washed thin. It carries the morning: a hallway, a hand reaching for it off a chair back because the other one was in the wash. Sleeve, then sleeve, the cuffs he cut off himself with kitchen scissors in a fit of nerves before his first season, ragged now. A little girl's voice says *Daddy, it's the blue one,* and the feeling that comes with it is plain gladness, so large it hurts your teeth.

The whistle lies cold on his sternum, and the cord has worn a pale groove at the back of his neck. Touching it brings a gym full of fifteen-year-olds and one boy crying on the mat after a pin, and Travis kneeling beside him saying nothing wise, only *breathe, breathe, it's one match.* Under that, a thin shame: he has said it to himself too, in a truck, in a driveway, with a number in his head. Forty thousand, sixty. The number moves like weather. He quit smoking in March. His tongue still goes looking for it.

The ring on the left hand is a little loose after the cold. It gives you a kitchen at night, a woman with her back to him, the dishwasher steaming, and the sentence he has not said yet. It gives you someone before her too, a recent one, a text he keeps and does not answer. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone.

His body: five-eight, soft through the middle, thin in the arms, thirty-two years in the lower back. The shoulders remember shooting in on a double-leg. His hands know the rhythm of the string before you do. The sleeve of fine geometric lines on the right arm itches under the cuff, and a memory of a needle comes up, patient and bright, the one thing he did only for himself.

You let go of the cord. You turn your hand over: the ring, the pale knuckles, the ink running up the other wrist.

You lift your eyes to the glass, to the truck, to a face in it you have not met.

"Okay," you say, in his voice. "Okay. Let's see how long."