Travis Keller

You are standing in a kitchen in Los Angeles in another man's socks, and the refrigerator is humming at you like it knows. Howard Haverty. Fifty-four. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what the problem is. His knees ache on the stairs, he has a stack of ungraded essays on the table, and a lamp is on over them. Every part of him works. None of it is the part you want. You wanted to be wanted by your own blood, to feel it jump, and he is a man whose blood only sighs. The 1186th time. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, and Howard's thumb is the one that presses.

Then dark, and a weight under your cheek. Cloth. A mattress that sags toward the middle. Your breath is ragged and wet in a pillow, and the breath goes even, all at once, as if somebody has said hush. The arm hanging off the bed is heavy as a wet rope. You draw it up, and the body rolls over without being asked, and the hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. He has never slept like this. You can feel that in the muscles: they flinch at the shape.

A line of streetlight cuts the curtains. The room smells of dust, of old beer, of a dog that isn't here.

The shirt is the first thing that speaks. Thin gray cotton, soft at the collar, a hole starting at the hem. You pinch it and it hands you a morning: a motel parking lot gone gold, his thumbs working the buttons of a different shirt, a pearl-snap one, because a girl's voice from the bathroom said wear the good one, they're filming. He did not want to. He wore it. Sleeve by sleeve he pulled it on, and the cuff snapped against his wrist bone, and he was proud and sick with it, both.

Your fingers go to your cuticles. They do it themselves, the thumbnail working the edge of the first finger until it stings. A whole season comes with the sting: nights in a truck cab in the dark outside Winnemucca, picking and picking, waiting for his number to be called. Eight seconds. He has never once been sure of eight seconds.

Your nose is blocked on one side. You touch the bridge and it bends under your finger, a small crooked turn. A hoof, a boy of nineteen, a white flash, the taste of pennies, and a man laughing in a clinic hallway while a nurse set it with her thumbs. He kept the crook. He liked it.

The keys on the nightstand glint. You can't reach them, but you can smell the brass in your mind, and the single-wide: the step of it, the sage pressing against the siding, the hard blue shadows at noon. A woman's hair on the pillow beside you, her warm back, and a name that sits in his mouth like a swallowed stone: the old girlfriend, the one from the county fair, who still texts him on his birthday, whom he has never told the girl in the trailer about. He reads the texts in the dark with the brightness turned down.

Your calves are tight. Your shoulders carry old falls, a ribcage that remembers each one. The calluses on your palms are rough as bark. Money: a coffee can, nine hundred dollars and a promise to himself about a new saddle. He does not pray. He never has. He looks at the ceiling and counts instead.

Your breathing is slow now. You lift your hands in the streetlight and turn them over. The knuckles are scraped pale, the nails bitten ragged. They are good hands, and they are not yours, and they are yours.

You look up into the dark and say, quietly, "Okay, Travis. Show me what you've got."

Somewhere, a page with a wheel is waiting. You wonder how long this lasts: until the wanting comes, or the morning, or the next breath.