Wyatt Pruitt

You are standing in a kitchen in Nashville in the middle of the night, in Ismael Barraza's socks, with the refrigerator humming and the whole house asleep. Ismael is fifty-one, five-six, and tired in a way that sits in the lower back. His wife's reading glasses are on the counter. You have worn him for less than a minute, and you already know what he is: a man who checks the locks twice and has a spreadsheet for the water bill. There is nothing wrong with him. The knees work, the freckles are his mother's, and the quiet is good.

But you can feel the quiet closing over you like a lid. You stand there with the glass of water he came down for and think that it will be like this at breakfast, and that this body has no height in it. Then you think of the tall ones, the ones who duck under doorframes, and you want to see a room from up there. That is the whole reason. You would never say it. You put the glass down on the counter and let go.

Now the edge of a mattress is under you. A lamp is on, the window is blue with the start of morning, and your hand is flat on your chest. Under it are ribs, and under those a heart, big and slow. The buttons come undone under your fingers and go back up in the right order. The tie is a black one. Your fingers knot it in a way this closet has never seen.

Then the body starts to tell you about itself. The carpet is under your socks, thin and gritty. The shirt is thin cotton, and the cuff against your wrist brings him back in a flash. It is last spring, and he is standing in a bathroom in front of a mirror, trying to learn a knot from his phone. His ex, Maddie, leans in the doorway and laughs, and then fixes the knot for him with two quick pulls. He felt tall and ridiculous and loved all at once. The feeling is his. It goes through you like warm water and leaves.

The tie is slick under your thumb. Out of it comes a different afternoon: the cubicle row, a headset pinching the top of his ear around the stud, a woman on the line crying about a bill. He said *I understand* until the words went smooth as pebbles, and he meant them a little each time. The jeans hold the number: twenty-three thousand and change, owed, with a card in a drawer he doesn't open. Your thumb finds the earlobe stud, and a memory of a church basement follows, folding chairs and bad coffee and his grandmother's hand on the back of his neck.

The body is enormous. The knees are wide apart. The shoulders are heavy with a sleep that didn't take, the stomach pushes against the shirt, and the beard is thin and itchy along the jaw. Yet the hands are quick. They want to do something, and they find the fringe of hair and press it flat the way he does when he's nervous.

You lift your hands and turn them over. The knuckles are broad, the skin is freckled to the wrist, and the palms are pink. They are very big. Everything is below you.

You look up, toward whatever is looking back, and say, low and amazed, "Well. Hello up here."

Somewhere the wanting is already asleep. You do not know how long it will stay that way. Maybe it won't wake today, or it might wake in four minutes. The tie is tight at your throat, and you breathe in until it holds.