Tyler Brandt

You are standing in a kitchen in Boston, in the dark, and the body you are wearing is tired in a way you have already stopped bothering to name. Paul Delaronde's knees ache on the cold tile. His gray hair is flat on one side from the pillow. Somewhere upstairs, the house is breathing. Forty-eight years of weight sits on him, and none of it is a surprise anymore, because you have had him for less than a minute and already know him all the way down.

That is the trouble. Nothing is wrong. The refrigerator hums. His phone lies on the counter with the page open, the wheel on it, bright in the dark. You pressed nothing yet. Something in you is already leaning toward it, the way a tongue goes to a tooth. He is fine, he works, he is warm, and you are bored. Nobody should be allowed to be bored in a body this solid. You know that, and you spin anyway.

The room goes out like a pulled plug.

Cold light. A hum overhead. You are bent at the waist with a box under your hands, your fingers in the flaps of cardboard, and the shelf is level with your chest. Cans. Rows of beans, a hundred little tin faces. The floor is under you, hard and sticky through boot soles. The glass at the front of the store is black, and a single streetlight stands out there on an empty street.

Your hands move. They were moving before you came, and they do not stop for you. One can is turned wrong, label sideways. Your hand corrects it, slow, then the next, and the next. Ten times, each one set and checked, the way a man checks who has done a thing ten thousand times and has stopped trusting it.

Then the memories, through the touch.

The vest first. Its nylon is rough against your upper arms, and the zipper teeth are cold against your ribs. He pulled it on at the door of a small house with a lamp on in the front room. His wife was asleep, and he did not wake her. He stood a moment in the hall with his hand flat on the child's door, just flat, not opening it, feeling the wood. You get the ache of that, the specific love, and it is not yours, and it goes through you like a drink.

The knife on its cord swings against your sternum. Under your thumb its little clip is worn smooth. He cut his first box open with it on a night so slow the clock seemed to be lying. He thought: *this is the job. This is all of it, and I am glad.* He meant it. The gladness has a taste, like cold water after something worse.

The gloves, stuffed in the back pocket, rough as bark. The shirt, gone soft with washing, sleeves hanging at the biceps. He dressed in the dark: shirt, then cargo pants, then boots, lacing the left one first, always, because that was how a sergeant taught him to do it when his hands shook too much to trust. They shake now. Fine, constant, at the ends of your fingers, a thin wire running through them. You feel it against the can. The tremor is why each one gets checked. It is also why he does not drink, a decision made once on a bathroom floor and kept every day since, a thing nobody at this store knows. You feel the keeping like a muscle that never gets to rest.

The ring is tight on the left hand. When you turn the hand, the tattoo comes up along the inner forearm, the stripes of a unit he carried. A flash: heat, a long road, a voice calling his name. You let it go by.

The back aches low and honest from lifting. His legs are strong. His heart is slow and steady. Twenty-five years old, and he is a good, tired, careful man, and he is not here anymore.

You straighten. You hold up your hands in the light and turn them over, and the tremor runs through them like a current. Beyond the glass the road is empty.

"Huh," you say, in a voice you have never heard. "Hello."

You do not know how long you get to keep it. Four minutes, four years. The cans wait. The wheel, somewhere, is already bright.