Steve

The first time I went with Steve to his ex-wife's house, we took some very small important things. We snuck in through the back and I faced the colliding creeks running with June's solitary rain, the late morning light on drifts of dead leaves, the marble obelisk, a stone shiva showing no signs of age, her breasts still young in their turquoise and glancing to and quickly away, almost seeming still wet from the sculptor.

If you do a good job here, if I hear you're working out, he said in the truck, there's no reason we can't put you on a gun soon. He rubbed the thigh of his jeans and there was dog hair on the fleece pullover between us in the cab of the truck. He sniffed, audible over the engine. His glasses slipped, only slightly. Antifreeze, he said.

The door was open in the back like he said it would be and he gave me a cardboard box, directed me to a thinly jointed storage shelf. It was loaded top heavy, with rows of videocassettes and slides. The old black metal, the skeletal beams were chipped and bent. It quivered each time I took something from it.

I heard Steve upstairs, his footsteps over my head. I saw him sitting on the couch, the length and girth of himself fully expanded. His head was tossed backwards, his eyes half open towards the cream of the ceiling. I had worked for him for only a few weeks then. I knew him barely at all. We left through the front door and he had no key to lock it from the outside. Underneath the carport, I hefted the box into the truck's bed and fixed it so it sat snug in a collection of crooked orange nails, empty cigarette boxes, the usable metal we pulled off from houses. He walked up behind me and our bodies met awkwardly. I stepped into the softness of his middle. He dropped a pair of very small, dirty sneakers into the box. Those are mine too, he said. He clapped my shoulder apaternally and we drove away.

I know, he said loudly. Even to me its weird.

We turned on to a gravel road, the way we had not come, and our bodies shook, it felt, from inside out.

Carl

Carl and Missy lay in bed for three days after they lost the baby. They bought pills on credit from her ex-husband, a recently former head engineer at the Ramada Inn, before that, a retired meth cook. He worked with us too. She mostly sniveled in the crease of his chest where, at the premature age of twenty four, the musculature has slackened from the two years he spent stacking railroad ties, the past six months he spent roofing with us, the seven years of pills and liquor and nursing black eyes and bruised ribs and bottles hid beneath Missy's sweatshirt. The dogfights they would sometimes host in the square of grass they rented in Maryville. She pulled her lips over her teeth and her chin bucked against his sternum in strange spasms of movement like twitching in sleep. Sucking in breath, her lips rippled over her jaws in brutish melancholy. Carl felt the black of his eyes spread to the ends of his face, and he let the pills ripen in his legs, the blooming chemical blue and red ballooning inside all the dry and cracked granite of his organs. He closed his eyes and let Missy cry alone and left both of his hands underneath his old t-shirt on the now empty body of his girlfriend. When he came to retching outside, he put his head down on the trailer's concrete steps. He dreamt he had a million dollars.