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.