Travis Pruitt

You are tired of Neil Oslowski's knees. That is the first honest thing. At forty, six-five, he has a cleft chin you've shaved around for seven days, and a bank teller's habit of counting everything twice, and tonight, in his dark apartment in New York, you stood at his window and counted the sleeping windows across the street and felt nothing move. He was a body that worked. That was the trouble. You had run out of what you wanted from him, or you never knew, and the page with the wheel was already open in your hand like a thing you'd been holding all week without admitting it. You pay. You spin. Neil's whole height goes out of you like a held breath.

Heat. Heavy air through a screen, a refrigerator humming open, its light cold on your face. Your thumb is lifted off glass. A price sits on the phone, a number bigger than a month of rent, and you are looking at it with a man's tired wanting that is not yours. You set the phone face-down on the counter. The hand stays where it put it.

You are shorter than Neil, six feet, and heavier through the middle, a soft, settled weight that leans on the counter edge. Your jaw is smooth. Something moves in your mouth: gum, mint gone to rubber, your teeth working it without being asked.

The flannel is against your back and arms, sleeves rolled, and when your fingers find the cuff it opens: a morning, this morning, before the dark. He stood in a bedroom with a girl asleep and pulled the shirt off a chair, left arm, right arm, the button at the wrist that always fights him. He thought about the watch he would never buy, and about her, and the rent. The jeans are stiff at the knee. Your hand drops into the pocket and finds a folded receipt, and the feeling comes up whole: the ship, the hangar deck, aircraft chained down like animals, the clank of the chains, the smell of jet fuel and wet steel, and a flashlight clipped in his pocket that he checks twice because his chief once told him a sailor who loses light loses everything. He is good at the chains. His hands know the turnbuckle, the quarter-turn, the pull.

Then the inside of your left forearm, where the sleeve has ridden up. Your thumb finds the ink without looking: the cross, the praying hands. A kitchen in a different house, a grandmother's, a rosary clicking against a cup. He got it at nineteen, scared, in a chair in Norfolk, and has never once told his girlfriend he prays in the head on the ship, every night, for nothing specific. For the number to be smaller. For the two of them to stay. The shame of that is warm and private, and it is the only thing in the room that is entirely his.

His feet ache in the soles. His lower back remembers lifting. Rain ticks the window. Somewhere down the hall she turns over in sleep and the bed answers.

You lift your hand and look at it. Wide, square-nailed, a burn scar nowhere, nothing invented, only a hand that has done work. You turn it over. Palm, then back.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, a little hoarse. "Okay, Travis."

The gum goes still in your cheek. You wonder how long the mint lasts, and how long you do.