Tyler Brandon Kessler

You are standing in a kitchen in El Paso with Daniel Hartigan's coffee going cold in his hand, and you have been him for less than a minute. A pilot. The cup has a chip at the rim that his thumb keeps finding. His shoulders are loose, his eyes are fine, and his body works exactly as it should. None of that is the trouble.

The trouble is the noon light on the counter. It is flat and total, and it shows you a whole Tuesday laid out like a tray of tools. Nothing in him is wrong. You just stood in the doorway of his life and felt the wanting come back, quick and low, like a hand in a pocket. So you put the cup down on the chip and open the page with the wheel.

You spin.

Rain. All of it at once, loud on a metal roof, and you are standing under it with your head tipped up and the hood already falling back. Cold water runs into your collar. You have stepped out of the shelter a beat early, and you did not choose that. His legs did. The board above the bench says 3 MIN in orange.

You are very tall. The ground is a long way down, and the weight on your shoulders pulls at both collarbones. The rain finds your face, your open mouth, the thin ring in the side of your nose, and it is the cold of it that stops you. He has not been cold in a long time, and you can feel that he wanted this.

Then the things he is touching begin to talk.

The jacket first, its wet nylon slick against your neck. It gives you a morning: a bedroom with the blinds half down, his girlfriend asleep in a knot of sheet, and him zipping the jacket in the dark so he wouldn't wake her. He stood at the door a full minute. He felt guilty and wanted to leave anyway, and the two feelings sat in him like one stone. He did not wake her.

Then the straps, hard across the shoulders, and the pack's whole weight settling into his hips. You get a driveway in a new subdivision, a pickup parked behind, a number on a loan he doesn't say aloud. Underwater, deep enough that the map on a hostel table looked like an exit. He bought the foam mat on credit. He rolled it tight, twice, until it stopped springing back.

The shirt under the jacket is damp and soft from a hundred washes. You get its sleeves one at a time: left arm through, then right, in a kitchen full of other people's cereal boxes. His hands knew the hem. Then the pants, the zip-off legs, the small click of the snaps. Then the shoes, laced hard, the mud on them already dry from some other country of a day.

In the right pocket your fingers close on a lighter. Your thumb flicks the wheel before you can decide to. Spark, spark, spark. It is the oldest thing his hand knows. You taste the pack a day in the back of your throat, a ghost of smoke, and under it the wish to quit. It belongs to someone who tells himself he will, after the trip.

His chest is good. His knees are young. There is a dull ache low in the back from the pack, and the legs go on forever, and everything in him is twenty.

The rain is steady and the bus is coming. A horn sounds somewhere down the road.

You bring your hand up out of the wet and look at it. It is long and pale, water beading in the hair along the wrist, the lighter still pinned under the thumb. You turn it over. It is not Daniel's, and it will not be, and it is not yours either.

You lift your eyes and say, to the street, to nobody, "Okay. Okay, you."

Somewhere behind that, quiet as a held breath, the question is already there: how long.