Vincent Tran

Elías has been awake for twenty-five minutes, and in that time you have already learned how to stand in him. The mop bucket is gray with last night's water. The school hallway smells of floor wax and cold radiators. His knees are twenty years old and complain about nothing. You are standing at the end of a corridor in Coastal Maine, before the day has started, and you know exactly why you're leaving.

He cannot make the sound. You tried it all morning, the way the older men at the harbor say the name of the town, with the vowel flattened and swallowed. You said it in his mouth and it came out wrong every time. His tongue knows what it knows and you can't teach it your wanting. The wanting is the problem. It came back, the way it always does, a pressure behind the sternum, and nothing in a boy's body could answer it. So you set down the mop, and you take out the phone, and you don't say goodbye to the freckles.

The wheel turns. You pay.

Then the bus is under you.

The seat is already warm. Your right hand is on the wheel, your left on the route sheet, and for half a second something is wrong, a motion done in the wrong order, and you do it again slowly, correctly, and the bus is fine. The wipers are still going. Steam lifts off the wet street, and the sun is on the blue houses, pink porches, a lit window. The engine idles through the floor and up the spine.

The shirt comes first. It's dark blue cotton, sleeves rolled twice, the cuffs stiff where he ironed them. You feel his thumb pressing the crease. The morning he put it on is a kitchen with the radio low, a button that wanted re-sewing, the badge pinned while he stood at the counter. He pinned it crooked and fixed it. He always fixes it.

The wheel is cracked and smooth under his palm, and it gives you the first years: a training lot, an instructor yelling kindly, the first full bus of strangers behind him and the strange new weight of being responsible for their evening. Ten thousand mornings fall through you in no order.

There's a pale band on the ring finger. When your thumb finds it, you get a woman at a table in a house with one narrow room after another, and the quiet after an argument that wasn't loud. He took the ring off in a parking lot. He felt lighter and then he felt nothing. No children. Just a hallway, a long one, and doors he leaves closed.

The knuckles crack before you decide to. It's the left hand, then the right, the habit of a man who thinks with his hands while his eyes are somewhere else. His back is strong and a little sore at the belt. His thighs are tight from sitting. His jaw is smooth, and you feel the dimples sit in his cheeks when you do nothing at all.

His life is not yours. It comes in pieces, only where you touch.

You lift your hand off the wheel and turn it over. The tan line, the knuckles, the pad of the thumb worn from the clipboard.

You look up, past the glass, into the steam.

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

Somewhere under the wanting, already, the question starts.