Wendell Sixkiller

Neil Brannigan's hands are good hands. They have taped ten thousand ankles, and they are shaking over the keyboard.

Three minutes in him, and already I know what he can't do. His knees remember a thing his mind keeps telling me is fine. I stood up from the couch and the apartment tilted, cheap and bright, the whole west side of Los Angeles humming through the window like a refrigerator. A tall man's loneliness is a long way to fall. I wanted to be down near the ground again, somewhere heavy and quiet. Brian's house still sits in my palms from eight spins ago: the dish rack, the scrubs in the hamper, the phone I held with his thumbs and the message I never sent his best friend. So I pay. The wheel turns, and Neil's blond beard goes out of my face like a light.

Dark. Weight. A mattress giving under a body that is mostly gravity. My cheek is in the pillow, my mouth open, and one arm hangs off the edge with the blood gone thick and ticking in the fingers. Streetlight through a gap in the curtains. I take one breath, ragged, and the next one comes even, and I don't know whose decision that is. The arm draws itself up. I roll onto my back, and my hands fold on my chest like a stranger's at a viewing. He never once slept like this.

The shirt first. Cotton gone soft from a hundred washings, damp at the collar, and under my shoulder blades a flash that is his and not mine: a Tuesday morning, the shirt pulled over his head in a hall that smells of fry grease, his girlfriend's voice somewhere saying take the trash. The sleeve rides up the arm. Under my thumb is the crest on his forearm, a shield, raised a little in the skin, and a whole fall Sunday opens: a cousin's couch, a kid on each knee, the stupid joy of a game that never mattered, and the needle afterward, bright and worth it.

The sheet under my palm, rough and warm. The lamp's cord. My fingers move without me to my mouth and the thumbnail is already between my teeth, bitten past the quick, and there is a taste of tobacco and old coffee. I know that shape. Under it, the fear of the bill on the counter, less than five thousand dollars to his name and three kids' worth of shoes. The headset pressed a groove behind his ear for eight hours of strangers yelling about internet that doesn't reach his own hollow. A rosary in a drawer. His mother's hands on it.

His body is short and wide and carries everything low. The knees ache with a clean, honest ache. The lungs are tight from the vape. The belly rises, steady. Somewhere beyond the wall a creek, a footbridge swaying in a green memory of summer, his youngest crossing it ahead of him, shouting that it moves.

I lift my hands into the streetlight. Square, scarred at the knuckles, nails chewed down. His. Mine.

"Okay," I whisper, in a voice with gravel in the bottom of it. "Okay, Wendell."

The room is quiet. Nothing in me says how long this lasts.