Walter Lyle Gagnon

You are standing in a dark kitchen in Anchorage, in Hector's body, with the refrigerator humming and a glass of water going warm in his fist. His knees ache in the cold. The birthmark on his face is a thing you keep touching. Everyone in the house is asleep. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the trouble: he is a man who lifts things, and you want to be a man who knows how things fit. You stood at the sink and could not make a drawer close right. The runner was bent, and his hands knew a hundred ways to hit it and none to fix it. Something small and humiliating, and you would not say it aloud. So you set the glass down, open the page, and the wheel turns.

Now you are leaning over a bench with a caliper in your right hand and your left flat on the casing of a machine. A bolt is half turned. The motion went wrong, and you do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked. Cold light comes through the window and the sea sits grey behind the shingled sheds. Your breath is a man's breath, even and unhurried, with a trace of old smoke in the lungs.

The caliper is cold, and it gives you a basement, thirty years back: a father's steel rule, and the thrill of a number coming out right. The band on your left hand is warm from the metal. It gives you a woman's laugh in a kitchen, a church on a winter Sunday, and kneeling beside her, a gladness that is his and not yours. Then it gives you a smaller, colder room, a recent woman, a talk in a parked car that ended without anyone being wrong. He carried it for weeks. The vest is fleece, soft at the cuffs. It gives you the morning in the dark, a zipper pulled up to the beard, and coffee he drank without sugar because the sugar was a thing he gave up when the drinking went. A line in his chest says one day at a time and means it. Your tongue finds the gap in his front teeth, and you taste a dozen years of whistling through it. His back is stiff, his shoulders strong, his fingers sure. They know the bolt before you do.

You turn the hand over. The ring, the grease in the creases, the tendons moving at your will. You lift your eyes to the glass.

"Well," you say, in his voice, "that's better."

You wonder how long you get this one, and whether the wanting is already waking.