Tyler Brandt

You have been Samir Khoury for two minutes, and already you know what's wrong with him. He is too careful. He is twenty-two and stands in a stranger's dark kitchen in Rural Texas, and his body keeps apologizing for taking up room. Somewhere down the hall a window unit rattles. Everyone in the house is asleep. You stand at the sink with a glass of water you don't want, and you realize you were never going to keep him.

Nothing he did was wrong. He just fit like a borrowed coat. Two minutes was enough to find that out. Your thumb keeps looking for a goatee that isn't a stranger's. You set the glass down quietly, the way he would, and you go back to the page with the wheel on it.

The wheel clicks and slows. It lands.

The fork stops halfway to your mouth.

Weight comes first, then the cold. It's a heavy canvas coat still zipped on a body that has been standing here a while, and the kitchen light hums yellow overhead. Rice and something fried are on the fork, and the smell of soy and old grease comes up warm. Your jaw is smooth. Your knees ache in a deep, practiced way. You lower the fork to the counter, and it sets itself down beside a foam container and a pile of envelopes.

You shrug the coat off. The canvas drags down your arms, and at the cuff you get the first flash.

It's a roof in August. The shingles are soft as dough, tar sticking to the soles of his boots, and the whole town lies below him in squares. He is sixteen feet up and hates it, then loves it, then stops noticing, the way you stop noticing a sound. The hammer comes up in his hand without being asked. It's a rhythm he doesn't think about anymore.

You sit. The chair is cheap and the seat is cold through his jeans. Under the window sits the dark glass, with nothing in it but a man.

You eat. The container gives up even mouthfuls, and he, or you, chews slowly. The envelopes under your wrist have red print on them. A number floats up out of the paper, and it's a hundred thousand and more, and it feels like standing in water that rises an inch each year. He doesn't panic over it anymore. He just carries it, and it sits behind his ribs next to the wanting a drink. The wanting comes with a smell, smoke and cold beer on a tailgate, and his throat remembers the first swallow.

Your forearm lies on the table. You push the sleeve of his undershirt up and see the script on the inner skin, a name and a date. You don't read it. The ink starts something anyway. It's a girl laughing in a truck cab with the windows down and wheat stubble going gold on both sides of the road. He had a chance at that. The memory ends the way he ended it, badly, and still carries it.

His back is stiff where the chair meets it. His shoulders are wide and thick from lifting bundles up ladders. His scalp feels strange under your palm, bristled and bare. This morning he bleached it again at the bathroom mirror, because it was something to do with his hands. He pulled this shirt over his head in the dark, and he crossed himself without thinking, because his mother taught him to, on the way out the door.

A thunderhead stacked black in the west at dusk. He watched the light go yellow from the ridge line and kept working anyway.

You put the empty fork down. Then you lift your hand off the table, turn it over, and look at the palm. It's cracked and callused, a stranger's hand and now yours. You raise your eyes to the black window and hold them there.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."