Warren Astle

Ramón's leg has been bouncing for three minutes straight, heel drumming the floor of a Western Kansas kitchen that isn't yours and never will be, and you already know this one is over before it started. Sixty years old, a soldier's bald head, brown eyes that keep sliding to the window like there's something out there worth seeing. There isn't. There's wheat and a fence line and the specific quiet of a house where nobody's home but him. Three minutes in this skin and you already know the whole shape of the boredom waiting at the end of it — years of it, maybe, if you let it run. You didn't spin the wheel to sit in a kitchen. You spun it to feel the second before the floor changes. So you open the site on his phone, thumb shaking a little on the glass because his hands do that now, apparently, all the time, and you pay, and you spin.

The box comes down onto bare floorboards with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence, and you are the one setting it down, the one whose hip it was braced against, the one whose knees — one real, one carbon and titanium and silicone, cold through the sock — take the small mercy of the weight leaving them. Keys still in the door behind you, swinging faintly. Light through a bare window, that particular white late-morning light that hasn't decided yet if it's going to be a good day. You don't reach for the keys. You leave them hanging and you walk the edge of the room instead, knuckles trailing the wall, feeling for outlets, for the give of old plaster, corner to corner, a man learning a house by touch before he lets himself believe it's his.

The wall is cool and slightly gritty with old paint dust, and it comes first through your knuckles — a flash of another wall, army-green, a barracks door, someone's fist against it decades ago and a voice that isn't yours saying *Astle, get up* — and then it opens wider than that, the way they always do, wider than you're ready for. He is not Warren the soldier anymore, hasn't been in forty years, but the wall doesn't know that; the wall gives you the wall he grew up bouncing a tennis ball against on Eastland Avenue, gives you a version of Nashville with fewer lights in it, gives you his mother calling him in for supper in a voice gone soft with distance.

The shirt is next, and it's the shirt that really opens him up — flannel, checked, worn thin at the collar, and your shoulders remember buttoning it this morning, his morning, sleeve first over the left arm because the left knee takes longer to trust and you like the shirt on before you commit to standing all the way up. Ring finger catching slightly on the second button, the way it always does now that the knuckle's swollen a little with age. The band is still on that hand, plain gold, thirty-one years old this June, and it brings his wife whole into the room — not her face first but her voice, telling him from another state entirely that the new place better have decent water pressure, that she'll fly out Friday, that she loves him, you damn fool, now go check the boiler. One child, grown, a voicemail unheard on a phone in his pocket that you haven't touched yet and don't.

The leg is the loudest thing in the room once you let it speak. Carbon fiber, cool where the trouser cuff's rolled back from it, and it gives you Kandahar in a single wordless jolt — heat, not this cold Tennessee floor — and then nothing more, mercifully, just twenty years of after: learning stairs again, learning a limp into a walk indistinguishable from any other man's, learning to stand at a bar all night on it without anyone clocking why he never quite finishes a beer before ordering the next one and a water behind it he never touches. Ex-smoker — you feel that too, in the itch under the sternum that isn't there but insists it is, an old argument with himself he won years ago and still refights on slow afternoons.

His body around you: sixty-three, six-one, the loose average build of a man who used to be more and has made an uneasy peace with less, bald head still faintly sunburned at the crown from a porch he hasn't had in twenty minutes, a mug of coffee he'll never finish drinking cooling somewhere back in Nashville's morning that his body insists is still happening even as his feet learn this new floor. The knee that isn't there aches in the specific phantom way it always does before weather changes. The other knee is fine, strong, a little stiff. His hands don't shake — they never have — but the right one wants to reach for a cigarette that hasn't existed since 1998, and finding nothing there, closes instead, slowly, into nothing.

You reach the far corner. The room smells like sawdust and old paint and, faintly, of the cardboard box behind you — moving-box smell, tape and dust — and under it, thinner, bourbon on breath that is now your breath, from a glass at ten this morning that his wife doesn't mention anymore because mentioning it stopped helping years ago.

You stop walking. You look down at your own hand where it rests against the doorframe, wedding band catching the flat window light, and you turn it over slowly, like you're checking it for damage, though nothing about it has changed.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the empty room, to whoever used to stand here — and you don't know yet if that's an hour of him or a decade.