Wesley Burkett

You are Liam Sheridan, and you are standing in a control room at the refinery with a cold coffee, watching a gauge you could read in your sleep, and you are bored down to the bone. It isn't his fault. His body is a good one: freckled forearms, a runner's lungs, a back that never complains. For four hours and thirty-nine minutes you have worn it like a clean shirt. Then the shift supervisor laughed at something on the radio, and the laugh went through you like a dropped wrench, and you understood that you did not want to be a man whom people laugh with. You want to be a man you have never been. The wheel is already open in your head. You pay. You spin.

Then you are standing up straight in a cold bright room, and your right hand is closing on something small and cold.

A caliper. The jaws are an inch from a part you have not looked at. Your thumb is on the wheel of it, and your eyes are on the window, where a gravel road runs out to a water tower. Your hand moves wrong. It slips a hair, and then, slowly, it goes again. You check the reading. You check it again. Ten times, each one measured, each one slow.

Fluorescent light hums. The vest is fleece, a little pilled, warm at the ribs. Your breath comes from lower down than you are used to, under a belly that rests against the shirt. The weight is in your thighs and calves and the soles of his brown shoes. Your head feels strange. You touch your scalp, and it is bristle over skin, too even, and the dye leaves a faint chemical sourness at the hairline.

The caliper handle is warm from his palm, and it opens something. You are in a garage with a man who is his father, a long time ago. The old man puts the same tool in his fist and says, *Measure twice, Wesley, because the metal doesn't forgive.* You feel the shame of being nine years old and wanting to be good at something. It is not yours, and it fills your chest anyway.

The vest zips against your sternum. You feel his hands pulling it on this morning in a dark kitchen, a bare bulb, a Bible face-down on the table beside a mug. He had meant to read it, and he had not. The shirt's checked sleeves were rolled twice, forearm by forearm, and the cuff buttons were left open. Then a gulp of something from a bottle behind the cereal, to level the morning out. Not the first this week. You taste it as a memory and feel his small private shame about it.

Under the bench is the concrete. Behind the glass the wire runs fence post to fence post, and you feel a church parking lot, a Sunday, a prayer said hard with his eyes squeezed shut. Beyond it is an empty house and a bank balance he checks too often. Fifty thousand, near enough, and nobody to spend it on. You find no one in the rooms of him. Only the machine on the bench, half built, which he loves in a quiet way.

Your hands are broad, scarred only by work and weather. You turn the right one over. The palm is thick and creased, and you feel yourself in it.

You look up, and you say, to nobody, in a voice that is lower than your own: "Well. Hello, Wesley."

You do not know how long this one lasts. The wanting is quiet in you now. You wait for it to come back.