Wesley Karam

You are standing in Terrence's kitchen in the dark before the roofing crews call, and your jaw already aches from the grinding you've been doing without noticing, all night, this new mouth of his working itself raw. Unibrow, black hair gone flat on one side from the pillow. Heavy in the shoulders, heavy through the gut, a body built for hauling shingles and nothing else. It is not the body that's wrong. It's that you sat down in it nine hours and eight minutes ago still buzzing with somebody else's house — Craig's rival's house, the manager's silver-haired, blue-eyed, scarred-eyebrow satisfaction of being the one who finally, finally got the promotion Hollenbeck wanted, the one you felt for less than a minute before you spun again out of pure appetite for more. You gave that up so fast you barely got to enjoy it. And now, sitting here in a body that isn't built for luck, all you can think about is that you were on the winning side of something for sixty seconds and you left it lying on the table. You open the site again on Terrence's cracked phone screen, thumb still learning its calluses, and you spin because you want, stupidly, to feel like that again — like a man who beat somebody.

The fork stops an inch from his mouth.

It comes back down. Sets itself on the counter, careful, the way a man sets something down when his hand has decided without asking him. The coat slides off his shoulders and drops onto a chair he doesn't look at. He sits. He eats the rest of the container in even mouthfuls, watching nothing in the black window over the sink, a window that is only a mirror now, giving back a kitchen light and a face he has not yet noticed is being worn.

The braids are heavier than you expect, a slow pendulum weight when the head tips down toward the fork. The shoulders are narrower than Terrence's, tighter, wired with a day of climbing scaffolding and running conduit still humming in them even hours after quitting time — this body went to bed sore and woke up sorer, and it is not tired anymore, not exactly, it is simply young in a way that doesn't ask permission. The mole on the cheek itches faintly, ordinary, the itch a mole has always had.

Through the fork: a whole day comes back sideways, not yours. A ceiling half-open, wires like intestines pinned along the joists, and Wesley up on the ladder with tape in his teeth, sure-handed, patient in a way he isn't patient about anything else. Pulling wire is the only time his mind goes quiet. His boss barking about the panel schedule. A stripped thumb, red and stinging, that he sucked on driving home and forgot about by the time he got here.

Through the counter under his palm: the cold of the formica, the smell of dish soap and old grease, and a memory of his mother's kitchen in Lexington, smaller than this one, her laughing at him for eating standing up even as a kid, tell him to sit down, Wesley, you're not a horse. He never did learn to sit for a meal unless he was too wrung out to stand, like tonight, like most nights.

Through the coat as it slides off: this morning — no, yesterday morning, whichever one this was before this endless working day — pulling the coat on over the shirt with FIJAS ELECTRICIAN stitched crooked on the pocket, buttoning it one-handed while holding a coffee, the parking lot outside his apartment fogged with cold, the footbridge over the creek slick with dew on his walk to the truck, green smell of wet leaves even in the dark. Threading the tool belt through its loops, the weight of it settling on his hip like something he trusts. His hair pulled back into its braids two days ago by a girl at the shop who does it for cash on the side, the part in his scalp still tender where she pulled too tight, dark roots already pushing up under the bleach like a tide coming back in no matter what he does to stop it.

Nothing about a wife. Nothing about a father who calls. A rented place, a paycheck that doesn't stretch, a body that has learned to want very little because wanting costs money he doesn't have. His hands, when they are empty, go to his mouth — he's already biting a nail before the fork is even fully down, a habit so old it isn't even a thought, just a body managing itself in the absence of anything else to hold.

He finishes the container. Sets the fork inside it. Looks at nothing, the window black and useless as a mirror, giving back braids and a mole and a face that used to belong only to him.

You lift your hand — his hand — off the counter and turn it over under the kitchen light, nail bitten short at the thumb, a fine white scar of dried joint compound worked into the creases that will not wash out until the shower does it for you tomorrow. You look up into the window instead of away from it, and what looks back has braids and a mole high on one cheek and hazel eyes that are, for now, yours.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the glass, to the next one down the line whenever that comes.