Tyler Reyes Callahan

You are standing in Daniel Hayashida's kitchen before the light has come up, and the coffee has gone cold in a mug you don't remember filling. The dishwasher ticks. He has a good life, and that is part of it: a lanyard on a hook, a wife's reading glasses folded on the counter, a Wednesday waiting in rows. All of it fits him, and none of it has ever been a thing you wanted. Last night a man at his work said something kind, and you stood there in the praise and felt nothing at all. So you open the page with his thumb. The wheel turns. You let it.

Wet street, and the cold of it in your face. Your weight is already mid-lurch. One shoe has just left the kerb and your hand slaps a parked car, the metal slick and cold under the palm. The scuff stops, because you stop it.

The jacket first. The lining is rough nylon, and the zipper pull hits your wrist. A flash comes up, and it is his and not yours: a hook by a door, a girlfriend's voice saying *take the black one, it's colder than you think*, and him taking the other because he was late. He was always a little late. You feel the shame of it, small and daily.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. In his thumb is the memory of a ring of keys he has lost twice this month, and of a bed with a woman's back turned to him, and of an ex who still texts him on Sundays. He doesn't answer. He drank tonight because he answered. Something went wrong in a kitchen. You feel it as a hot stone under the ribs, and it is the drink and the grief together, loosening.

The shirt, soft and washed thin, carries a memory of the morning. He pulled it on in the dark of the apartment at the start of a night shift, one arm and then the other. The van smelled of cardboard and old coffee. A scanner clipped at his hip. Under it all he was proud, quietly, of being someone people could count on to arrive.

Your feet are in boots that are too worn at the heel. The earring in the left lobe is a small cold bead. His stubble is rough under your knuckles. You are twenty-two. Your legs are strong and your head is full of warm static, and the sidewalk tilts gently like the deck of something. You smell wet brick and a far-off fryer. Every forty steps he thought of the girlfriend asleep, and of the ex, and you feel him leaving even though he is already gone.

You lift your hand into the streetlight. Freckled wrist, bitten thumbnail, a pale line where a ring of keys always rides. You turn it over slowly. It is warm. It is yours now, by the same rule as the last one.

You look up, to the corner and the left turn, and say, quietly, "Okay. You."

Somewhere under the words the question is already there: how long.