Vincent Paul Marchetti

Nothing is on tonight. The day has drained out of me and the feed has gone stale under my thumb, the same three arguments and a video of a dog. At some point, as always, I am reading about people waking up as other people. I have been doing this for as long as I can remember: the films, the long threads at two in the morning, the private hunger of it. Nobody has ever sold it. Tonight the page has a wheel on it, and I pay, because I do not believe it, and I spin.

Then I am standing up.

It is bright, and a hum is coming from the ceiling. My right arm is stretched out along a shelf and my fingertips are on the edge of a box. My left hand holds something heavy with a trigger in it. I breathe, and the breath goes down further than mine ever have. The motion I was in the middle of goes wrong. The box skews under my fingers. I stop, and I square it again slowly, corner to corner. The next one I check as well, and the next, ten of them, each one looked at, on a job that his hands have not needed me to watch in years.

The thing in my left hand is a price gun. When my thumb closes on the grip, a Saturday opens up behind it. A back room, a hand-lettered sign, and the cold pride of getting a shelf perfect for a manager who never noticed. Under the pride is a patient sort of tiredness that has no resentment in it.

The vest is thin and a little stiff at the pocket seams. Under it the black shirt has gone soft from washing. His wife folded it. I know it in the heel of my hand, a small square of laundry on a bed. This morning he pulled it over his head in a dark room, his shoulders cracking quietly. He worked the vest zipper halfway and gave up. He put on the jeans one leg at a time, sitting on the edge of the bed so he wouldn't wake her, and he laced the black shoes tight, the left tighter than the right because of the ankle. I feel that ankle now. I feel the knees, the lower back and its dull ache, the fifty-seven years in all of it. Strength is in there too, in the forearms and the shoulders, a steady strength that was made by lifting boxes.

My right hand drops from the shelf, and the fingers curl and crack by themselves, one knuckle after another. It is a habit older than any thought of his. It brings a driveway cut steep below a bay window, and cold white light on wet concrete. Two kids' bicycles are leaned against the wall there. A rosary hangs from a mirror. A Wednesday evening is coming where he will pour a glass of water, because he has never wanted anything stronger. The wedding band is warm and tight on the left hand. When I press it with my thumb I get her laugh, and the whole house moves toward it.

I turn my hands over and look at them. Then I look up at the glass, where a bald man with a gray beard and a pale scar through one eyebrow is looking back.

"Hello," I say, in a voice that has never said it before. "Hello, Vincent."

The street outside is steep and bright. I do not know how long he is mine. It could be years, or it could be until my next wanting arrives, and it is already stirring somewhere underneath this one.