Trevor Wojcik

The man I am leaves the way he came, which is to say I leave him in the middle of a sentence he will never finish. I have been Jesse Kohlmeier for less than a minute. His kitchen in the dark, his wife's breath down the hall, the tile cold under feet that were mine for no time at all. The fridge hummed. On the counter sat a glass of water I had poured and not drunk, and I stood looking at the scar through his eyebrow in the black window, and understood that nothing was wrong with him. He worked. He was tall enough, sound enough, and he had a house.

But he was a man with a house, and a house has a shape you are expected to keep. His wife turned over somewhere and said his name in her sleep, and it was not mine. That was all it was. Not a failure of his. A small door shut in my face by a stranger's love. I laid the glass down. I opened the page with the wheel on it.

Now the streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across my back like a cold hand, and I am face-down in sheets that smell of him, sweat and fabric softener and something burnt and plastic underneath. My breath is ragged, then it is not. One arm hangs off the mattress. I draw it up. I roll onto my back and my hands fold themselves on my chest, and a body that has never once slept this way lies there, tidy as a carving.

Everything is heavy. Twenty-four years of weight settled low, the soft belly rising under the shirt, the long legs tangled in the blanket, two meters of someone I have to learn. My mouth tastes of beer from some night or other. My scalp prickles where the sides are clipped, and the hair on top is mussed into the pillow.

Then the shirt. I have slept in his work shirt, the dark one, and the collar against my neck gives me a morning: his hands, not mine, doing the buttons in a locker room smelling of resin, bottom to top, because the top one always sticks. Rolling the sleeves twice, because the line runs hot. The earplugs, blue, on their cord, looped around his neck out of habit. His thumb hunting the pocket for a pen. Click. Click. The pen is in the nightstand's mess now, and my right hand twitches toward it unasked, thumb pressing at nothing.

The sheet under my fingers is rough, and it opens a winter. The L going over, the whole room trembling, the cup on the sill walking toward the edge. He lay awake listening to it and felt, plainly, that his life was a thing happening on a track above him. Not sad. Just loud, and passing.

My heel finds the carpet's grit and I get the plastic itself: a bright ribbon of it spooling off the die, warm, endless, and his gloved hands guiding it, and the pride he would never say aloud, of being the one who can hear when the line goes wrong. His back aches where he lifts the spools. His knees are fine. His hands are strong and thick in the palm, with calluses at the base of each finger.

I lift them into the streetlight and turn them over. They are not mine. They are mine until I decide otherwise.

"Okay, Trevor," I say, low, to the dark. "Let's see what you've got."

And already, somewhere under the breath and the beer and the L passing overhead, the quiet starts up again. How long, I wonder. Until morning. Until the next page. I flex his fingers and do not know.