Travis Mabrey

Wendell's knees ache first, the way they always do this late, kneeling isn't the word — this body doesn't kneel, it settles, joints stacking down slow like a folding chair with rust in the hinges. Sixty-five years in a frame that never asked to be borrowed, and you're the one who's been borrowing it, sitting at the kitchen table with the laptop glow doing nothing for the dark under his eyes. Dimples that used to mean something on a younger face. Gray hair he keeps cut close because long hair on an old man reads as trying. You've had him less than a minute and already you know why you're leaving: not boredom, not cruelty, just the small mean fact that his hip doesn't let him stand up from a chair without a sound coming out of him, an old-man grunt, and you are so tired of that grunt. Eastern Kentucky at this hour is nothing but crickets and a refrigerator hum. You open the site. The wheel is already turning before you decide it's turning.

The breath changes before anything else does — ragged, then even, one long pull that isn't yours yet and then is. Face-down in sheets gone damp with a body's night-heat, one arm dangling off the mattress edge like something already given up on. Streetlight comes through a two-inch gap in the curtains and lays a bright seam across the bed. The arm draws itself up. The whole body rolls, unbidden, onto its back, and the hands — bigger than Wendell's, younger, a wedding band catching what light there is — fold themselves at the chest like a man laid out at a viewing. He has never slept like this in his life. You have never slept like this in his life either, not yet, not until right now.

The sheets under you are cheap cotton gone soft from washing, and that's the first door: a woman's hand smoothing them over a mattress in a townhouse that isn't this one, years back, a different bed, a different marriage — the ex-wife, her laugh through a bathroom door, a fight about money that was really about something else. It closes as fast as it opened. Skin against skin, your own forearm against your own ribs, and there's the half sleeve waking up under your touch: a rose gone soft-edged with fourteen years, ink laid down in a shop in Marietta the week he turned eighteen, his mother's face when she saw it, not mad, just tired in a way that stuck with him. Bold American lines, faded to the color of an old photograph. He got the last piece — a banner, empty, never lettered — three years ago and never went back to finish it. Meant to. Didn't.

The pillow smells like his own head, like the drugstore shampoo his wife buys because it's on sale, and that's a door too: her, tonight, asleep three feet away, turned toward the wall, her alarm set for a shift that starts before his does. Two kids down the hall who are, thank God, actually asleep for once, a rare Friday mercy. He works the line — door panels coming down on schedule whether he's ready or not, torque gun heavy and familiar in his hand, the exact weight of it arriving now like a phantom, though his hands are empty here, folded on his own chest. He clocked out eleven hours ago. This is the wrong end of his day to be this deep asleep, but a double will do that to a man, will make eleven in the morning feel like midnight and midnight feel like nothing at all — and there's the memory of the shirt, this same navy work shirt, hanging on the closet doorknob because he was too gone last night to hang it right, snaps still done up from where he unbuttoned it fast and stepped out of it, tired down to the teeth.

The morning he last put it on comes back sleeve by sleeve, because the shirt is what's touching him now even in sleep-memory, some ghost of fabric-logic the body still runs: right arm first, always, so the tattoo doesn't catch on the cuff wrong. Snaps done up one-handed while the coffee maker clicked and hissed behind him. His wife's voice from the other room, asking would he be back for dinner, and him saying maybe, and meaning it, and missing it anyway, the way he does more than he'd like to admit out loud to anyone, even her. The birthmark on his jaw catching the bathroom light in the mirror the way it always does, the same as every morning of his life, the thing people notice and then, if they're decent, stop noticing. His leg bouncing under the table while he laced his boots, a habit with no name and no cause, just a motor that runs whether he's thinking about it or not. Thirty-two years old, strong through the shoulders in a way that came from the line and not from trying, a body that knows how to lift and torque and stand eight hours without complaint, that has never once been asked to hold a cigarette and never wanted to.

Your eyes open.

You lift the hand off your chest — his hand, the ring catching the seam of streetlight — and you turn it over slow, knuckles then palm, like it might mean something different from this angle. It doesn't. It's just a hand, younger and thicker and better than the last one, warm from sleep, faintly restless already, a leg under the sheet starting its old bounce without permission.

You look up, into the dark of a room that isn't yours, toward a lens that isn't there yet but will be.

"There he is," you say, quiet, to no one, to the ceiling, to whoever's asking. "There he is."