Wade Thibodeaux

Omar's body is too young for what I want, and that is the whole trouble. Twenty. Freckles. The goatee I keep touching with my thumb. I have been him for less than a minute, standing in a kitchen in San Francisco where the light hasn't come up yet and a roommate's cereal bowl sits in the sink. He has a lecture at nine and a lifetime of Tuesday ahead of him, and what I feel in his chest is a hunger he wasn't built for. I don't say it out loud, not even to myself. I open the page. The wheel is already turning under my thumb.

You land mid-stroke.

The brush is in your mouth, foam on your lip, the tap running into a white basin. Your eyes were on nothing and now they are on the drain. The stroke stops where it stopped. Then it starts again on the other side, slower, and you work the back molars, because your arm seems to know the order. You are standing on cool tile. Sun comes in white through a tall window, and the air has the wet warmth of a street that has just been steamed.

The first thing is the shirt. Navy, worn soft, a pocket on the chest, and the cotton drags against your shoulder blade as you lean. It gives you a morning without asking: his fingers on the buttons of another shirt first, the plaid, then a change of mind, because the plaid is for the field and today he is only going in late. His hand takes the navy off a hook. He is thinking of her, the girlfriend, a Sunday and a hymn she hums under her breath. Under that, thinner and older, is the other woman, the one who left, and he has not yet decided what he feels about the quiet. It sits in his sternum.

Your left leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing since you arrived. You tell it to stop and it doesn't, and the tile hums under your heel.

You spit. You rinse. Cold water on the beard, two inches of coarse hair that smells of soap and, faintly, of dirt that never quite leaves. Your tongue finds the gold canine, and with it comes a flash that isn't yours: a dentist's chair in a town upriver, a hundred and ten dollars he didn't have, and a laugh when it was done because it looked ridiculous and he loved it. He has never once been sorry.

You rinse again. The brush goes into your hand and you stand it bristles-up in a cup, out of the grey water where it has always sat, and you don't know why you do that, only that it feels clean.

The pants are canvas, gone soft at the knee. In the pocket there is a folded bill and a pocketknife, and when your thumb finds the knife you get the rows: a long green line of crops under a sun already heavy, crates stacked at the end, the ache between the shoulders at the fortieth crate and the particular pride of bending without thinking. Calluses at the base of each finger. A back that is strong and a left knee that complains. He has a little money put away, and the number is a quiet comfort he keeps from everyone. He used to smoke. He stopped, and his hands still reach for it at the end of a row. He doesn't drink, and nobody in his church has ever had to ask.

You raise your hands.

They are broad, scarred only by work, the nails short and rimmed with brown. You turn them over. They are warm and entirely yours and entirely not. You lift your eyes to the mirror, and the green ones look back, steady, and the gold flashes when your mouth moves.

"Well," you say, in a voice like gravel, "good morning, Wade."

The leg is still bouncing. You wonder how long the knees will hold, how long the wanting stays quiet, whether tomorrow's light will find you here or somewhere else.