Vincent Truong

You are standing in Brett Sandvik's kitchen in Honolulu with the lights off, and you have been him for less than a minute. His refrigerator hums. The tile is cool under his bare feet, the phone is already in his big hand, and the wheel is already on the screen, turning its slow colors on his blue-eyed face in the black glass of the window.

He is perfectly good. He is thirty-two and six feet of heavy, easy muscle, and everything in him works. Nothing is wrong with him. But when you reached for a glass of water, his hand knew where the glass was. Somewhere in the first breath, a woman's laughter came up through his palm, from a counter in a kitchen like this one, and it was a good laugh and it was not yours. You stood there with it in your chest like a swallowed coin. You do not want to be handed someone's happiness and told to carry it. So your thumb comes down on the page.

The streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains, and you are face-down.

There is no travel. There is wet cotton against your mouth, and your breath is ragged, dragged in through a throat scarred by years of smoke. Then it evens out in a single pull, and the arm hanging off the mattress draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back and your hands fold on your chest, a posture he has never once slept in. You lie there like a man laid out. Something in the room is quietly wrong, and it is you.

Then the sheet under your palm gives you the first of him.

It is a flat cotton sheet, washed to softness, and it hands you a wife's side of the bed. There is a long warm shape in the dark, and her feet are always cold. Forty years of her feet against his shins, and he has never once said they bother him. The feeling is a deep, dumb gratitude, with no words in it.

The pajamas are checked cotton, thin at the cuffs. They give you the morning he bought them, a department store in Gentilly. His daughter held them up against his chest and said Daddy, it's a good one, and he felt ridiculous and pleased. Then the pillow gives you the smell of his own hair oil. His knuckles are stiff, and when you press your thumbs across them they crack, one, two, three, without your asking. That is his habit, and your hands are doing it for him. The ring is a thin, worn gold band, loose at the joint, and when you turn it, a whole decade opens. Three children are crowded into a shotgun house one room wide, and the rooms run in a line from the street to the yard. The rent is late. He sits on the back steps at night with a cigarette so nobody sees his face. He is a man who counts every dollar and prays to nothing in particular. He feels there is something larger that listens when it is quiet, and he has asked it for nothing but his children's sleep.

His chest is soft over a hard ribcage, and the lungs ache on the exhale. The old scar through the eyebrow tugs when you frown. It came from a cabinet door and a boy's tantrum, and he thinks of it as the day his son was born. You know his body now, from the inside, as a debt: the pack a day, the drink or two each evening, the knees.

You lift the hand into the streetlight, and the ring catches it. You turn it over, palm and then back. You lift your eyes to the dark, and you say, in his small rough voice:

"Whose is this one?"

Nobody answers. Down the hall a child's old bed creaks and the house settles, and you ask yourself how long this will hold.