Yosef Barakat

You have been awake since before the light, and the screen is the only bright thing in the room. Nothing is on. You have scrolled past the same threads you always end up in: the man who wakes in another man's bed, the swap, the stranger's mouth saying your words. You have loved this for as long as you can remember. It was never something you could buy. Now there is a page with a wheel on it, and you pay, and the wheel turns, and you do not believe it.

The power drops. Two seconds of hum and dark.

Then you are in the chair. Your forearm is clamped under a buzzing machine, the green soap is cool and slick on the skin, and the needle is biting a hundred small times a second. The arm does not flinch. Your jaw, which was locked, goes loose all at once. You turn and watch the needle work, and it feels like watching someone stitch a couch. The breath is slow and wide. There is a lot of belly under the black shirt. Your knees ache in a way that is long settled.

The shirt collar is damp on your neck, and a morning comes up through it. His thick fingers working buttons in a dark kitchen before first light. A wife's voice from the bedroom, half asleep, telling him to eat something. He ties his boots with a grunt. He stands a moment at the doorway of a child's room, and then another child's, and then a third, and does not go in. The cotton knows all this.

The denim over your thigh gives you a motel at two a.m. on I-10. A bottle on the nightstand. His own hand setting it in the trash, and the long clean years after. Sober by decision, a decision he makes again each morning like a prayer.

Under the left thumb the ring turns. Your thumb finds it without being asked. A wedding under a canopy, glass wrapped in cloth, the stomp, the shout. Then another woman, long before, laughing in a parked car with the windows fogged. It is an old ache and it is not yours, and it has no bitterness left in it.

The chair's cold vinyl, the rubber hum under your boots. Thirty years of trucks, the shudder of a clutch in these calves. The money is real, a number tucked safe, a house paid down, and he is proud of it in a plain way he never says aloud. The tattoo is a name. You feel it forming in the skin and you do not know whose yet. Something holds back, and you let it.

You lift the free hand. The fingers are thick and scarred at the knuckle, the ring a little tight. You turn it over. Palm, creases, a man's whole working life. You look up past the lamp, past the window going blue.

"Well," you say, in a voice gravelled and low. "Hello."

You wonder how long this lasts. An hour, a year. Whether the wanting comes back tonight, and the wheel with it.