Warren Tsosie

You are at a screen, in the middle of a day that has nothing in it. You have scrolled until the scrolling stopped meaning anything. For years you have read the threads at two in the morning, watched the films where someone wakes up in someone else's life, and wanted it with a plain, private ache. Tonight, which is not night where you are, there is a page with a wheel on it, called vessel.cards. You pay. You spin. You do not believe it.

The wheel stops, and you are sitting up.

The couch gives under you, old leather gone soft. The room is dark, and the television throws its light across the backs of your hands. The remote is loose in your right hand. The show cuts to a bright frame, white and sudden, and you set the remote down on the couch arm because it is yours to set down. Your spine is straight. Your breath goes in slow and deep through a chest that is wider than it is strong. The house is asleep around you. Somewhere a refrigerator hums, and a man was laughing at this a moment ago, and you do not.

Then the things start to talk. The cotton of the shirt against your back is worn thin, and it gives you the morning, though the shirt is only a night one. Warren put it on after the shower, standing in the closet so he would not wake her, and his feeling was gratitude, plain and nearly embarrassing, that she was still there breathing in the bed. The sweatpants cuff at your ankle brings a Saturday years ago: a small girl asleep on this same couch, his arm gone dead beneath her, and he would not move it for an hour. A boy's school photograph is on a shelf somewhere in the dark. He cannot see it, but the knowledge of it sits in his chest like a warm stone.

Your fingers find the seam of the cushion and a longer thing opens. Church, the folding chairs, the coffee. He quit drinking in a garage with the door down, pouring a bottle into the drain, and the shame of it still has a taste. Under your tongue there is a ghost of a nicotine pouch. His jaw works at nothing, wanting a toothpick. His hand knows where they live, in the drawer by the sink.

The rug is rough under your bare soles, and with it comes a woman from before, the one who got away, a porch light and a car pulling off. He has never told anyone how often he still sees it. It is not disloyalty. It is only a door he never closed, and it sits quiet beside the wedding band, which turns on your finger with a small cold weight.

Your knees ache, your lower back is tight, and your belly sits soft over a body that was once harder. His hands know cables, the click of a connector seating, a rack door swinging open on cold air. They are good hands, and they have been tired for a long time.

You lift them into the television light and turn them over, and the ring catches the glare. You look up at nothing, at the glass of the dark window, and you say, low, "Okay. Okay, it's real." Your voice is a stranger's, gravel and warmth. Under it the wheel is already there, patient, the question you cannot put down: how long this one lasts, and when the wanting comes back.