Tyler Wayne Brandt

You are leaving Jonathan Kwan Lee's body at a bus shelter on Bird Road, with the humidity sitting in his patchy beard like a wet hand. He has been yours for under a minute. You were waiting for the 87 and found you could not stand being in a body so thin that the wind would rather have it elsewhere. You'd wanted a student's life and got a backpack straps-cutting-in life, a phone with a cracked corner, a lecture you could feel waiting for you like a tooth. Nothing was wrong with him. You were hungry, that was all, and the hunger had a wheel in it. So you take out his phone with his thumb, pay, and spin.

Then the room is cool and dim and you are tall.

You are standing at the foot of a bed with your hand flat on your chest. Ribs under the cloth, each one a rung. The shirt is wrong by one button, and the tie hangs loose and cold on either side of your neck. The lamp is yellow. Somewhere beyond the wall the light has gone strange, thick, the color of a bruise healing.

The cuff against your wrist gives you the first one: a church basement, a folding table, his mother pressing this shirt's twin against him, *you'll want one for funerals and interviews.* He was sixteen. He hated that his wrists stuck out. The feeling is embarrassment, warm as a stove.

The carpet under your socks: a house with the same carpet, a dog's hair worked into it, a summer he lay on it with a fan blowing and nothing to do after graduation but wait for trucks to be loaded. Quiet, enormous, wheat all the way to the sky.

Your fingers find the tie. Silk, slick, slightly damp from a closet. The memory comes through your knuckles: his grandfather's hands behind him at a mirror, showing him a knot, *over, under, through, don't strangle it.* The fingers remember before you do. They want to make it, and you let them, and the knot comes up tight and small and handsome, a style you never learned.

Your shoulders are wide and sore in the particular way of a man who pushes mowers for ten hours. The palms are hard. The thighs are long, easy, springy. You are hungry in an honest way, for eggs. No beer in him, no smoke, a clean mouth. In the back of his skull is a small tidy sum of money he is proud of, never spent, and the shape of the pride is a boy putting dollars into a coffee can.

Today is not mowing. Today is a hearing, or an interview, or a funeral; the feeling is a stiff collar and a dry throat. You do not get which. He keeps that.

You look at your hands. Big, rough, steady. You turn them over.

Then you lift your eyes and say, to the dim room, "Well. Hello, Tyler."

The thunderhead leans against the window. You wonder how long this one lasts, whether the wanting will come back by supper, or in four minutes, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.