Travis Kolberg

You have the page open and nothing else you want. The evening is the flat kind, end of a day, a thread read to the bottom, another opened. You have always been drawn to this: the films where the eyes change, the two a.m. posts about waking up in somebody else's life. You never believed there was a door. The wheel is a page with a wheel on it. You pay. You spin. It slows.

Then you are standing in an aisle, and your arm is out.

Your left arm is raised toward a carton on the rack, and a scanner on your wrist is warm against the bone. Somewhere out of sight a forklift beeps in reverse, over and over. The air is cardboard, dust and cold concrete. Your weight sits low and forward, in a belly that has carried the day. The hand was moving through the pick without him, and it has just done it wrong. You pull it back and do it again slowly. The label, the scan, the lift. Then ten more, each one checked, on a job this body has not needed to check in years.

The vest comes first, orange, stiff with grime at the hem. When your fingers close on it you get his morning. It is a Thursday, and he is pulling it off a hook by the door while the house sleeps, because his shift runs through the night. The polo is already on. He put it on in the dark so as not to wake her, one sleeve and then the other, and the cuff catches on his watch. He bites a thumbnail on the way to the truck and tastes salt.

The scanner gives you money. A figure is a stone in his stomach, owed on the truck and on the card. He does the sum in the break room most nights, and it never comes out. Underwater, he thinks, and he prays about it, short, clumsy prayers in the cab with the engine off.

The ring on your left hand turns under your thumb. A kitchen, her laughing at his gold tooth because he talks with his mouth wide when he is nervous. The tooth is a canine, and you find it with your tongue now. Then the name on his forearm, script, a name and a date. You do not touch it, and it comes anyway: a different woman, years back, a porch light, the one who got away. He never says her name aloud. A cigar sits in his jacket for Fridays, and once or twice a month there is a night that ends with him on the bathroom floor, laughing.

His knees ache. His lower back has a hot rope in it. His hands are strong and thick, and they know the weight of a case before they lift it.

You look down at them. You turn the right one over, and the bitten nails, the ring and the tattooed forearm are all yours. You lift your eyes to the dark end of the aisle.

"Well," you say, and the gold flashes. "Hello."

The forklift beeps. You do not know whether this is a minute or a lifetime. The wanting is already there, quiet, asking how long you get to be him.