Wayne Sockabasin

You are leaving a stagehand's body, and it is not the body's fault. Cody Spradlin has been yours for less than a minute. You stand in the dark behind a hall in Eastern Kentucky, before the sun is up, with a roll of gaff tape on your wrist and a dad belly pushing at a black t-shirt. His blue eyes are fine. His knees are fine. But you ran his phone's thumb over the names in it and none of them rang for you, and your own wanting started up again, small and hungry, like a motor turning over in another room. Nobody needs a reason that good. You press the button.

Light. Cold, gray, wet light, and then the weight comes: you are standing in a trench, bent at the waist, and the shovel is already moving. You catch it wrong. The blade bites crooked, the load slides, and your wrist corrects half a second late. You do it again, slowly, the right way. Then ten more, each one checked, as if the dirt might have changed its mind about being dirt.

The handle is worn smooth, and it gives him up. A wooden D-grip, the same one, his father's hand over his on a spring morning: *lead with the hip, not the back.* The shirt clings, damp and thin, the reflective stripes stiff across your chest. This morning he pulled it from a hook by the door in the dark, sleeve first, left arm, then right, and thought of nothing but coffee he doesn't need to wait for. He doesn't drink. He has a cigar on Fridays, on the porch, with the traps stacked up gray beside the silver shingles. The cold sea light comes in sideways.

Under the jeans, the leg remembers a crest inked on the calf, years ago, a night he was proud of. A team his daughter loved. She is somewhere, grown or nearly. There was a woman too, the one who got away. Her name rises in his chest like a swallowed stone and sinks again. He has prayed on it. Church Sunday, folding chairs, a hymn he knows by heart.

The body is fifty and thin and strong in the way rope is strong. Your shoulders ache pleasantly. Your fingers want to crack their knuckles, and they do, all by themselves, a small bright pop. The beard is short against your jaw. The hard hat is warm.

You let go of the shovel and look at your hands. They are brown, scarred across the backs, steady. You turn them over. Then you look up at the gray house, the traps, the yellow machine waiting, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last." The wanting is already there, a very small motor, waiting for you to notice it.