Wesley Marchand

The soot never fully leaves a chimney sweep's hands, no matter how long you scrub, and this morning in Anchorage you stood at the sink scrubbing them anyway, because the itch was not on the skin. It was under it. Travis Kowalek's beauty mark sat on the back of your wrist while you watched the water run gray, and you thought: *forty-seven is a fine number, athletic is a fine word, but you have had this face for eleven days and there is a ladder in the truck outside with your name — his name — stenciled on the rung, and you are tired of climbing into other people's flues.* It isn't hate. It's never hate. It's just that the wheel is sitting there behind three tabs on a laptop that isn't yours, on a Monday morning that belongs to nobody, and the itch always wins. You dried your hands on his jeans, walked to the bedroom he rents by the month, and spun.

The stairwell does not echo, and that is the first wrong thing, because a half second ago you were somewhere with an echo and now you are somewhere that eats sound whole. Fluorescent light, white brick gone the color of old teeth, and a phone warm and close in a hand that is not the hand you had. This one is thicker through the palm, a nose ring cold against upper lip when you breathe out through your mouth without meaning to, a beard that is not the beard you shaved off years and bodies ago. The third repetition of a name is still leaving him — leaving *you* — lower than the first two, dragged down like something pulled underwater, and the stairwell just takes it. No echo. No answer. You are standing two steps from the bottom in shoes that already know how stairs work, and you go down them two at a time before you've decided to, because his body has been doing that its whole life and it does not wait for permission.

The phone is the first key. Your thumb — his thumb — is still over the screen, over a forum thread with a name in a black serif font, ITALICIZE THE VOWELS the post says, SAY IT ALOUD THREE TIMES ALONE, and under your palm the plastic case gives you a flash: him laughing about this an hour ago, texting a buddy from the station *lol we're doing a seance in the stairwell during lunch, dumbest shift ever,* not believing a word of it, doing it anyway because Ramirez dared him and because the shift has been slow and a body needs something to do with its hands between calls. That's the feeling underneath — not dread, not before, just a grown man killing forty minutes with something he'd call stupid to your face and mean it.

The hoodie zipper is cold where it rides his sternum, and the fabric gives you more: this exact hoodie, put on at five-forty this morning in a bedroom two miles from here, one arm through the sleeve while the other hand fished a nicotine pouch out of a tin on the dresser, because the coffee wasn't working yet and hadn't worked in the two years since he quit drinking and started needing something else to do with the first ten minutes of being awake. The tin is in the hoodie pocket right now. You can feel its shape against your hip, a small hard rectangle that has ridden in that pocket through four hundred shifts.

The stairs under his feet know this building — Station 23, the back stairwell nobody uses because the elevator's faster, except the elevator has a camera and this doesn't, and some part of him has always wanted one place at work with no camera in it. Boots on concrete: steel-toed, scuffed white at the seam, a rhythm his legs have without thinking, and thinking about it at all brings back a whole shift two winters ago, a man down on Grand River with a chest that wouldn't rise right, and these boots planted wide on wet asphalt while his hands — competent, unhurrying, the hands of somebody who has done this enough times that panic doesn't get a vote — cut a shirt open and found the rhythm underneath it and brought it back. That's what these hands know how to do without being told. That's the thing he's actually good at, better than he'd say if you asked him.

The asthma lives in his chest, has since he was a kid, an inhaler in a side pocket he hasn't reached for in three days because the air's been dry and kind, and his leg — this leg, right now, on the third stair from the bottom — is already bouncing, has been bouncing since before the séance started, a tic so old he doesn't register it as movement anymore, just as the sound his knee makes against denim while he waits for something to happen.

And there's a year that comes up through the collar of the t-shirt underneath the hoodie, worn soft from washing: a woman's name that isn't attached to anything painful anymore, just present, the way a scar you stopped noticing still catches light in certain rooms. Two years together, ending without a slammed door, both of them just tired in a way neither could fix. He still has her number. He has never once, not in eight months, actually called it. The shirt doesn't tell you why he thought of her three sayings of a stranger's name ago in a stairwell with no echo — maybe he didn't, maybe that's you reaching for a reason where there isn't one — but the shirt gives you the shape of the missing all the same, worn thin at the collar like everything else he doesn't examine too closely.

Thirty-three years old, six-one, and every muscle in it built by carrying weight that isn't his own — gurneys, backboards, sometimes a person twice his size down three flights because the elevator's out — and none of it is showing off, all of it is just Tuesday. You reach the bottom stair still descending two at a time in a body built for exactly that, and you stop, because there's nowhere else the stairs go.

You look at his hands. Soot-free, calloused wrong compared to the ones you had an hour ago in a different city under a different sky, a green light from nowhere still ghosting at the edges of what his eyes report. You turn one over slow, like it might correct itself, and it doesn't, because it's not going to.

"Ramirez," you say, to no one, to the empty stairwell, in a voice that comes out lower than the one that said the name three times, "you're gonna owe me for this one" — and you don't know yet how long you get to keep owing it.