Warren Takeda

You are standing in Ronald Dahl's kitchen in Anchorage, and the dark outside the window is the real thing, thick, with the stove clock saying nothing helpful. His beard is rough against your wrist when you rub your face. Two minutes you have had him. The belly sits against the counter edge like a second, patient person. Good body. Bald head cold, blue eyes that read the page of the site fine. Nothing is wrong with him, and that is the trouble. In two minutes you have found the one thing he cannot give you: you opened the cupboard and every mug in it was a mug you would never choose, and you stood there wanting to be someone who would. That is all. You will not say it again, even to yourself. You put the phone on the counter and press the wheel.

It turns, and you are standing in a narrow kitchen under a round ceiling light, tilted a little forward. The phone is gone from your shoulder and in your hand, still warm, a tinny little tune starting over from its first bar. The pen has stopped on an envelope. Second digit. Your fingers are still shaped around it.

You are lighter. Taller, narrow through the chest, the ribs a ladder under a soft shirt. Your knees feel forty-seven years old, and your lower back reports it at once, a dull wire running up from the belt line.

The shirt first, because it is against you everywhere. Blue, washed soft. Memory arrives in his feeling: the dark bedroom, a husband's breath still slow in the bed, the shirt pulled from the second drawer by touch so as not to wake him. Left arm in, then right. Then the gray sweatpants, the drawstring knotted twice because they ride low on a man with no hips. The tiles are cold through the socks. That cold brings the apartment, rented eleven years, the dish rack he keeps meaning to replace.

The pen is cheap and blue, and its barrel gives you something else: a register, a lane, a beep, the belt running, an old woman counting pennies onto the rubber and him waiting, kind, not rushing her, drumming his fingers on the scanner's side. Your own fingers have started to drum on the counter. You did not tell them to. Twenty-two years of that rhythm.

The ring turns under your thumb. Plain, a little loose in winter, tight in this heat. Hands know it before you do: Daniel, the name arrives with the taste of coffee, a laugh in the next room, a hand on the back of his neck while he does the crossword. It is a large, uncomplicated happiness, and it is not yours, and it goes through you anyway like a swallowed warm drink.

Then the eyebrow. You touch the scar and get a bicycle, a boy of nine, gravel, a cousin laughing and then not laughing. Under it something older and quieter: a man named Peter, before Daniel, a car outside a church, a postcard he never threw away, kept in a shoebox that Daniel knows about and has never opened. Longing, mild now, worn to a smooth stone. He turned it over often.

His jaw is smooth. He shaved last night, and the razor's sting comes back with the evening whiskey, one glass, sometimes two, and the old ghost of a cigarette in the hands near the stove at the hour he used to smoke. He quit nine years ago. Both of you want one.

The music loops again. Somewhere a person will eventually say a name.

You lift your free hand and turn it over. Long fingers, a pale line of ring-shadow, the knuckles dry. His hand, and you are in it, and it does not feel borrowed in the way you thought. It feels worn in.

You look up at the room, then at whoever is looking back from the dark window glass, and you say, quietly, "Hello, Warren."

The hold music starts over. You wonder how long this lasts, whether the wanting will come back by lunch, whether this is still your face tomorrow.