Wyatt Kessler

The man you are leaving has been Glenn Overholt for less than a minute, and already you can feel what's wrong with him. It's early, the Seattle dark going gray at the kitchen window. His knees are good and his shoulders are wide, and he is six-three of silver-haired competence. The house is quiet and expensive. Nothing in him wants anything. You stood at the counter with the coffee going cold in his big hand and understood that this was the trouble: the body works, and it is only a body, a coat that fits. You wanted to be a man who didn't know what was coming. You put the mug down, open the page, and the wheel is already turning, and you let it.

Then you are standing in the middle of a morning.

Gray sky, flat light. A gloved hand is held out in front of you, mid-gesture, and the other holds paper. Your feet are planted on gritty concrete. Something in the rhythm was wrong, one motion done badly, and now you do it again, slowly, correctly. You are shorter. The air is heavier and smells of cut steel and wet dust. Above you a frame goes up in the sky, and men on the deck are small and orange.

Everything you touch begins to talk.

The glove first. Stiff leather at the knuckles, a split seam at the thumb. A flash comes, not yours: a hardware-store aisle, buying the cheap pair twice because he lost the good ones, and the small shame of that. The drawings in the other hand, soft at the corners from being folded and unfolded. He knows these sheets better than he knows his own phone number. A hundred mornings of the same lines come at once, and under them a worry about money, a number with too many zeros that he does not say aloud. Underwater, he thinks, in his feeling, not yours.

The shirt lies against your back, a green henley, the three buttons worn soft. This morning arrives sleeve by sleeve. A bedroom with the blinds half open and someone's warm back turned to him. He pulled the shirt over his head in the dark so as not to wake the man there. He pushed his arms through, shoved the sleeves up, and felt the old tenderness he doesn't name. Then the vest, the zipper stuck, the folding rule slid into its pocket where it always lives. Jeans stiff with dried mud. Boots laced without looking.

There is another man in the shirt too. An older flash comes, the way a name comes back when you stop reaching for it: a different porch, a different year, a laugh, and a door shut quietly. He hasn't thought of it in months, and it still sits in him like a stone in a shoe.

Your belly sits soft above the belt, a comfortable weight. Your lower back aches with a dull, honest ache. The beard is thick against your jaw, and your thumb has been working at the skin beside your nail until it stings. You were picking at it before you arrived. A bottle once, a cigarette with it, and then neither, and the quitting is a quiet pride he carries.

You look at your hand. Fine geometric lines on the inner forearm, pale, patient. You turn the hand over. Then you lift your eyes to the street, the dead stoplight's neighbor, the shut diner, the sky.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low and a little rough. "Let's see how long you last."

Whether it's you or him you mean, you don't know yet. Somewhere a wheel is waiting.