Travis Ledger Mahoney

You are Terrell Odom, and you are standing in a laundry room on base with a sock in your hand. The dryer is still ticking. Eight days and twenty-one hours you have been him: the gap in his teeth, the quick legs, the way the sergeant says his name like a question. You were fast in him. You could do nothing with fast. Today a girl in the next row said his name across the parking lot, warm, as if it belonged to her, and you answered to it and had nothing behind the answer. Nobody there wanted you. They wanted him. So you drop the sock on the folding table, and you go.

The wheel turns. You are standing at a steel table with a knife in your hand.

The rhythm breaks. Your hand does one cut wrong, then does it again slowly and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because you are checking. Red pepper, wet and cold, falls in strips under the blade.

The mesh glove is stiff on your left hand, and the knife handle is worn smooth at the spot where his thumb lives. A flash comes up through it, his and not yours. A pale morning, a different kitchen, a chef he was afraid of, saying *you don't look at it, you feel it*. He had been nineteen. He had cried in the walk-in, quietly, with the door held shut by his hip, and then came back out and diced two cases of onions without a mistake. The pride of that is in your chest like a swallowed coin.

The apron strings are tight at your back. The shirt is soft gray cotton gone thin at the collar. It gives you the morning: his hands pulling it over his bald head, the cool air on a jaw he had shaved too close, a face in the mirror he did not much look at. Then the navy pants, the black clogs with one lace-less heel crushed flat, a cigarette on the porch of the bungalow with the mountains blue behind the roofs. His lungs remember it. They want another, a whole pack's worth of wanting, a dry scratch you clear with a hard cough. Your eyes blink hard, twice, without asking you.

Under the collar the tattoo sits against your skin. Touching it through the cotton opens a face: a woman, laughing, older than she should have been when he first drew her. The portrait is his grandmother, and it is the one thing he ever paid for without thinking about the cost. Then, close behind it, the ex-girlfriend, a voicemail he has not deleted, her voice saying *call me when you're up*. He did not call. He thinks of it each Sunday in a church with folding chairs, and prays about it, a little, and does nothing.

His back aches low and honest from standing. His feet ache. His savings sit somewhere in the numbers he keeps in his head, like a held breath, enough to leave on and not yet spent. The window light is gold across the containers of diced onion, carrot, celery. This is a good evening for it, and he would have said so.

You lift your hand. It is square, nicked, quick, smelling of pepper. You turn it over.

"Well," you say, to the lens of the room, in his voice. "Hello, Travis."

The knife waits. You do not know whether you will be here for the next pepper.