Wade Colston

You are in Karim Haddadi, and Karim is leaving you.

You are standing in his kitchen in Pittsburgh with a mug that has gone lukewarm. The coffee tastes of the pod and not of him. You have been him for under a minute and already you know what the problem is. Nothing in him is wrong. The suit is pressed, the lanyard from the agency hangs on its hook, and the phone shows a client at ten-thirty. He has a clean, small, tidy life and every drawer in it opens easily. That is exactly what you cannot stand. Fifteen hundred and sixty-five times you have been handed something that worked, and your hand goes to the page anyway, the way a tongue goes to a gap. Karim's thumb is already on the trackpad. You think: *you were fine, you were perfectly fine,* and spin.

The wheel clicks down through its names, slows, and stops.

Heat first, then green. The air is thick with creek and cut wood, and you are standing on planks with a rolled print under your left arm and your right hand open in the air, halfway through explaining something to a man whose sleeve you can see at the edge of your eye. Your mouth was making a word. You let it finish. It comes out wrong, in a voice a half-step lower than Karim's, with a drawl worn smooth.

Then the print. The paper is soft and curled at the edge, and you squeeze it without meaning to.

*Tube of drawings, tape on the end, a pencil behind the ear that is not there now.* He rolls them every morning the same way, tight, shoulder to hip. A trailer on the far bank, a footbridge with its cables rusted, the county wanting it signed off before the funding ran out. Three summers on this bridge. He knows which plank gives. He knows it in his heel.

The lanyard swings against your chest, and the card knocks his sternum. A photograph on it, taken in the worst light, and he hated it. He kept it anyway because the woman in the office laughed when she took it, and that was a good day.

You take a breath and it goes deep, because the chest is bigger than Karim's. There is a weight across the shoulders, built over years and not in a gym, from hauling and pulling and carrying. Your right forearm is warm. You shove the cuff and feel under it the slight tug of ink on skin, and you know without looking that it is a face. A man, in gray. His father, and it comes in his feeling and not yours: a hand on a steering wheel, a truck, the smell of Winstons, and a grief so old it has gone quiet and settled in the bone like a plate. Every Sunday he lights a candle for him. Catholic in a county of Baptists, kneeling in the back where nobody looks.

The shirt next. Soft chambray, the blue washed down, the sleeves rolled twice and no further. He buttoned it standing at a sink with the window open, thumb working each button up from the bottom, two days of stubble under his other hand, and he thought *shave, tomorrow.* He tucked his hair behind his ears with two fingers, left side then right, a habit older than the job. He pressed a pouch under his lip against the first long day of the week, and the sting is still there, mint and faint burn, a small private comfort. Last night there was no big night. He had a beer on the porch and went to bed alone and was fine with it. That is his whole life. Quiet, paid for, his.

Under your boots the planks flex. The boots are old, cracked at the toe, and they hold his weight as if they know it. Somewhere beyond your shoulder the creek runs brown and unbothered. The man in front of you is waiting for you to finish the sentence.

You look down at your hand. It is wide, scarred across one knuckle, with freckles dusted over the back, and it turns over without being asked. The fingers curl, and it is yours.

You lift your eyes and say, quietly, "Give me a second. I'm not quite here yet."

And under that, as the creek goes on, the question that is always there. How long, and when does the wanting come back, and are you still him tomorrow.