Tyler Brandt

You are Curtis Hollenbeck for under a minute, and already you hate how the foundry sits in him. His shoulders ache with it, and a heat lives in his forearms that never leaves. You stood in his kitchen with a cup of coffee going cold and understood that you had not come back to the wheel because of the heat. You came back because the cup was his, and the kitchen was his, and nothing in it asked you a single question. You wanted to be asked something. You pay. You spin. Curtis is gone mid-sip.

The couch takes your weight before you know you have weight. Your leg is already bouncing. The right one, the heel drumming the floor, and you cannot make it stop because it was never yours to stop. Foil on the window crackles as the day leans on it. A corner has peeled, and a bar of light lies across your face. You turned from it. Now you turn back into it and open your eyes to the glare and do not blink.

The couch fabric is rough against your bare forearms, and it gives you a night in this room: a girlfriend's voice on speaker saying *sleep, I'll call after*, and the foil going up with tape at six in the morning, his thumbs smoothing every crease so no seam would let the sun in. He is careful. He is tired in the way of a man who works while others dine.

The trousers hold the shift. The cloth is warm at the knees, and the memory comes sleeve-first. Last night: the white shirt, buttons from the bottom up because he always starts low, the vest, the jacket, and the silver tasting cup lifted over his head by its chain. In the cellar, between racks, he held a bottle up to the bulb and knew its year by the color at the rim. No one in this town knows he can do that. He keeps the pouch tucked under his lip in the cold stone aisles and feels like a man with one clean secret. His tongue finds it now, a ghost of mint and burn. The shirt he wears now is the green one, soft, pulled tight across a belly that is not ashamed of itself.

The floor is cold under your bare feet. The linoleum remembers: standing here at four in the morning, pouring seltzer into a wine glass because he stopped drinking and refuses to stop loving the glass. He did it on purpose. A decision, and he was proud of it. The pride arrives in your chest like a swallowed stone.

Then the debt, a number with too many zeros, folded in a drawer, the weight he carries upright into every dining room. He sleeps anyway, because exhaustion is stronger than arithmetic.

You lift your hands into the light. Soft, broad, stained faintly purple at the nails from the cellar. They know the weight of a decanter. You turn them over slowly and lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is not yours yet. "Let's see how long you last."

Your leg bounces. You do not know whether it stops tomorrow, or in four minutes.