Walter Donnelly

The first thing I notice is that Neil Brannigan's flour is still in the creases of his knuckles. I am sitting at his kitchen table in the dark, before the bread is even started, and I have been him for less than a minute. The goatee itches under my thumb. His scalp is cool and smooth where it was shaved the night before. It's a good body. It has a baker's forearms and a shoulder that doesn't hurt. It does what I tell it.

None of that is the trouble. The trouble is the ovens down in the shop are cold, and I know the weight of the dough he would be pulling, and I can't make myself want it. It's a pleasant, finished sort of life. Somewhere on the other side of the page is a wheel that has never once stopped wanting something for me. I click it. Neil's thumb is still on the trackpad when the colors start to turn.

I land mid-stride.

Gravel. Cold air goes into my chest and comes back out white. My left foot is in the air and wants to come down, and I let it come down on the right instead, and the run goes on without a hitch. Something buzzes against my wrist, a split I never ran. There is water on my right, flat and smoking in the first gray light. There are earbuds in. A man's breath is going in and out of me, steady, a little ragged at mile four.

Then the things on me begin to talk.

The jacket first. The zipper tab bumps my chin, and I remember it as his: a Sunday, a church parking lot, his wife tugging this same zipper up for him because he had been fussing with his bad cuff. Her name comes and goes. It has a warmth in it I didn't ask for and can't use. The sleeves are worn soft at the elbows. He has put this jacket on in the dark for eleven winters so as not to wake her.

The scrubs are under it. Navy, thin at the knee. The fabric against my ribs gives me a kitchen that is not mine: a small one, a counter lined with pill organizers, Monday through Sunday, the plastic lids clicking one after another under his thumb. An old man named Mr. Aldridge calls him "son" and gets his name wrong on purpose, and he lets him. Thirty years of that, his hands doing it before he thinks. He bites his nails, and I find my teeth at the edge of a thumb. The skin is raw. I take the thumb away from my mouth like a stranger's.

The shoes know the path. My feet have been over this gravel a thousand mornings, and the soles carry a rhythm down through my shins. Under it is a smaller memory, a hospital hallway and a girl's small hand in his, long ago, their one child. It's the only thing in him that makes my chest hurt in a way that isn't running.

The ring is on my left hand. It knocks cold against my other knuckle as my arms swing. I feel what it was to put it there, the fear and the stupid joy of it, and under that the evening glass of something amber he pours most nights, one or two, and the taste of the cigarettes he gave up and still reaches for in the air.

He is skinny, and wiry, and fifty-eight. His knees complain, and his lungs are proud of themselves. The freckled face I haven't seen yet is cooling in the wind.

I slow, and the watch lights up with a number I never earned. I turn my hand over. Nails chewed, a pale band of skin under the ring, the veins standing up. The hand is steady.

I lift my eyes to the water, then to nothing.

"Morning, Walter," I say, trying the name out loud, and the breath smokes away from it.

I don't know how long this one lasts. The wanting is quiet now. It always is, at the start.