Reconstruction - chapter 4 (with images) (Patreon)

The paper on the exam table tears under my left thigh when I shift my weight. A sharp, dry sound in a room that’s too quiet.

I’m sitting on the edge of the table in an examination room at Meridian Biomedical’s regional office. The room is air-conditioned to freezing, smelling of rubbing alcohol and expensive floor wax. I’m wearing my gray t-shirt, bare below the waist. My jeans and the compression shorts are folded on a plastic chair in the corner.

Dr. Aris is standing by the window with his arms crossed. He’s a knee man. He rebuilt my career by approving the Lattice. He’s looking at the blinds, at the plastic wand that tilts the slats, refusing to look at the table.

Hayes is pacing, wearing a dark blue suit today, not the gray one from the hospital. He keeps stepping near a biohazard bin in the corner and pulling his foot back when his shoe squeaks on the linoleum.

The fourth person in the room is a woman named Dr. Chen. She’s Meridian’s lead structural pathologist. She’s the only one actually looking at the problem.

She snaps a pair of latex gloves onto her hands. The noise is loud.

“Lie back, please, Cole,” Chen says. Her voice is thin and tired.

I lie back. The paper crunches again. I stare up at the ceiling. The tiles are white with little random divots. I put my hands flat on my stomach, the abs hard under my palms, the dark line of hair running down. The top half of the table is still the keeper. The bottom half is the problem.

Chen steps between my spread knees. I’m splayed open under fluorescent lights while a stranger in a white coat examines the pink seam tucked between my thighs.

Her gloved fingers part the soft folds. The touch is cold. The latex drags against the inner tissue. A bright wrong jolt goes up into my stomach. Nothing over those nerves to take the edge off, like the skin got skipped. I lock my jaw and force my breathing to stay slow. I don’t flinch.

She presses the tissue, measures the depth of the cleft, traces the upper hood where the knot of nerve sits. I stare at the ceiling tiles and count the divots. Eighteen in the square above my head.

“The architecture is remarkably stable,” Chen says. She isn’t talking to me. “Vascularization is complete. The mucosal lining is fully active. It isn’t a surface mimicry. The mesh built a fully functional vulva and vaginal canal.”

My hands tighten on my stomach. “There’s fluid,” I say, my voice rough against the quiet room. “In my shorts. On the chair.”

Chen doesn’t look up from between my knees. “That’s a normal biological response to the cycle,” she says, flat. “You’re ovulating.”

Aris lets out a hard breath. He turns away from the window. “You told me the material works toward a fixed structural architecture for the joint.”

“It does,” Hayes says quickly. He stops pacing. “It repaired the femur to the baseline mechanical load.”

“And then it built female genitalia on my captain,” Aris snaps. His voice echoes off the walls. “You pitched this as a sub-dermal load-bearing mesh. You didn’t say it was going to run an uncontrolled biological rewrite.”

Chen pulls her hands back and strips the latex gloves off. They snap inside out. She drops them into the biohazard bin. The plastic lid clatters shut.

I push myself up on my elbows and swing my legs over the edge of the table. The soft rise of tissue presses flat against the paper. I don’t try to cover myself. They built this. They need to look at it.

“Why did it happen,” I ask. I keep my voice flat.

Chen picks up a black tablet from the counter. “The Lattice responds to mechanical stress to accelerate healing. It requires a massive caloric and hormonal expenditure to rebuild shattered bone in two months. Your body was depleted.” She taps the screen. “The mesh is designed to source localized stem cells and raw material from adjacent tissue to construct the repair.”

“I fed it thirty-five hundred calories a day,” I tell her.

“Calories are just fuel. The mesh needed blueprints to organize the tissue,” Chen says. She looks at me. She doesn’t look apologetic. “When it exhausted the local androgenic signaling around the trauma site, it initiated a systemic cascade. It pulled dormant estrogenic markers from your fat cells and misread the tension of your pelvic floor.”

Hayes steps forward. He holds his hands out, palms up. “It was an unintended architectural divergence. The mesh encountered a deficit in the original blueprint and substituted a default biological sequence to complete the structural integrity of the region.”

“A default sequence,” I say.

“Without a testosterone signal strong enough to read, the tissue ran the baseline pathway,” Chen says. “Same one an embryo runs before the male signal switches it on. The mesh wasn’t told to build male, so it built the default and closed the circuit. It isn’t a statement about you. It’s the sequence it had left. It doesn’t stay in your leg, either. It seeds. There are filaments seeded up through your trunk and your face by now, too fine to image, nowhere near dense enough to change what you’d see in a mirror yet. The femur’s just where they’re thickest, where we put them. The rest of you is being run from there.”

The room is silent. The low hum in my right femur is there, a vibration deep in the bone. It’s working right now. It worked while I dove for crosses this morning. It worked while Mari touched me in the dark last week. It built this on purpose.

Aris walks over to the table. His face is pale. “Is it still changing?”

Chen taps the tablet again. “The primary remodeling phase is over. The genitalia are fully formed. The mesh has entered a maintenance state in that region.”

“So it’s done,” I say.

“Locally, yes,” Chen says. “Systemically, we are monitoring your hormone levels. The blood panel we ran yesterday shows elevated estrogen, but it hasn’t overwritten your natural testosterone. Your upper body mass and muscle density are currently holding.”

I look at Hayes. He’s sweating around the collar. He knows my face is on a billboard overlooking the Broken Arrow Expressway.

“I don’t care about the cascade,” I tell him. “You put this in me. How do we undo it?”

Hayes nods. “We’re opening a formal reversal inquiry today. Meridian is committed to restoring your original anatomy. We are assembling a team to calibrate a new sequence.”

“How?”

“We can introduce a targeted secondary mesh,” Chen says. She sets the tablet down. “A localized patch. We program it with your preoperative androgenic baseline. We thread it through the new tissue, and we let it dismantle the female architecture and rebuild the male.”

I look at her. The words sound clean. Dismantle. Rebuild. Just chemistry and physics.

“How long,” I ask.

“We need to build the patch,” Hayes says. “We need to run simulations so we don’t destabilize the femur. Six to eight weeks before we’d even know whether the patch holds. In the meantime, you’re cleared to play. The joint is perfect.”

I look down at my own lap. The tucked lips. Nothing where the weight used to be. Six weeks. Eight weeks.

I can do eight weeks.

I’ve played through torn ligaments and pulled hamstrings. I know how to tolerate depletion and pain. I just need a timeline. A fixed point on the calendar where the lie ends and the body goes back to being mine.

“Open the inquiry,” I say.

“Already done,” Hayes says. He drags a hand down his face. “We’ll need weekly blood draws. Dr. Chen will personally oversee your chart. We’re going to fix this, Cole.”

“Make sure you do,” Aris says. He doesn’t look at Hayes. He walks toward the door. “I’ll see you at the training ground tomorrow, Cole.”

Aris leaves. The door clicks shut.

Chen turns back to the counter and starts logging her notes on the computer. Hayes hovers for a second longer, offers another tight nod, and follows Aris out.

I’m alone in the room with Chen. She doesn’t speak to me.

I slide off the exam table. My bare feet hit the cold linoleum. The right leg takes my weight. It holds.

I walk over to the plastic chair in the corner and pick up the compression shorts. The spandex is dense. I pull the shorts up and the seam finds the cleft right away, that easy wrong heat, and I adjust the tuck through the fabric and breathe through it.

I pull the stiff denim on over the shorts and buckle the belt. I grab my keys from the pocket of my jacket.

Chen looks up from her monitor as I walk toward the door.

“Keep up the caloric intake,” she says. “Your body is still burning massive amounts of energy to maintain the new structures.”

“Yeah.”

I walk out of the clinic. The hallway is lined with frosted glass doors and abstract corporate art. The air conditioning is freezing. I take the elevator down to the lobby and push through the revolving doors out into the parking lot.

The heat outside hits my chest and my face. The pavement shimmers in the distance.

I walk to the truck, climb in, crank the AC and sit in the blast of it a minute with my palms off the hot wheel.

Eight weeks. The inquiry is open. They’re building a patch.

I place my right hand on my thigh, over the pink surgical seams hidden under the denim. The bone vibrates. The mesh is working. I just have to train hard, maintain the muscle mass, and wait for Meridian to turn the key the other way.

I put the truck in gear. I pull out of the lot and head toward the stadium. I have a midweek fixture to prepare for. I have a club to captain.

The seam of the compression shorts grinds against me when I press the gas pedal. I ignore it. It’s just an injury, just tissue damage.

It has an end date now.

The wind coming off the river carries dust and the smell of hot asphalt from the expressway. I park the truck on the gravel shoulder. The tires crunch loud in the quiet afternoon.

I leave the engine running for a minute and look through the windshield. It’s Sunday. The sky is that pale, blown-out white you get in Oklahoma in late October when the heat refuses to break.

There’s a soccer pitch in the middle of the park. The grass is mostly crabgrass and clover, chopped to pieces in the center circle and worn down to hard yellow dirt in the goalmouths. The white lines are faded to almost nothing.

Mari is sitting on the bottom tier of a small aluminum bleacher on the near sideline, wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She has sunglasses on.

Out on the pitch, a kid is standing in the center of the near goal frame. The net behind him has a tear in the left corner, the nylon cord unraveled and hanging loose. The kid is wearing a neon yellow jersey two sizes too big. The sleeves cover his hands. He’s kicking the metal post with the heel of his cleat.

Thump.

He waits a second, then kicks it again.

Thump.

I cut the engine. I have a cardboard tray with two coffees from a drive-thru on Peoria. I grab it and push the truck door open.

My boots sink a little into the soft dirt at the edge of the grass. I walk over to the bleachers. Mari turns her head when she hears me coming. She doesn’t smile right away. She watches me walk the last twenty yards.

I hand her one of the paper cups. “Black,” I tell her. “Two sugars on the side.”

“You remembered.” She takes the cup. The cardboard is sweating. She tears a sugar packet open with her teeth and dumps it in.

I sit down on the aluminum bench next to her, leaving two feet of space between us.

We watch the kid. He’s stopped kicking the post and is now watching a passenger jet draw a slow white line across the sky. He has his hands on his hips. He’s skinny, all elbows and knees that look too big for his legs.

“He’s awful,” Mari says. Her voice is deadpan.

“You warned me.”

“I told you he was bad. His team lost six-nil yesterday and he spent the second half picking at a hole in his sock. The coach put him in goal because he’s a liability anywhere else on the field.”

“Goalkeeper is where you put the kids who don’t fit,” I say. I take a drink of my coffee. It tastes burned. “It’s an isolating position. You aren’t really playing the same game as the other ten guys.”

Mari looks at me over the rim of her cup. “Were you ever a liability?”

“I was too big. I kept hurting the other kids by accident when I tackled them. They put me in the net so I’d stop drawing fouls.”

I look back out at the pitch. Santi is scuffing his toe in the dirt. He’s wearing generic black cleats with the laces tied in a sloppy double knot.

“He doesn’t know what to do with his hands,” I say.

“Nobody ever taught him. His dad left when he was four. The rec league coaches are just guys who played baseball in high school and got roped into volunteering.” She sighs. “I bought him the gloves last week. He sleeps with them on his nightstand.”

I set my coffee down on the metal bench. “I’m going to go talk to him.”

Mari doesn’t say yes or no. She just nods once and takes another drink. I look at her and think about Dr. Chen, about the patch that’s supposed to dismantle this in eight weeks. I don’t tell her about it. Not yet. She’s letting me cross the line, but she’s watching my back while I do it.

I walk out onto the grass. My shadow stretches out long in front of me. Santi sees me coming when I hit the top of the eighteen-yard box. He freezes.

He knows who I am. He has the Arkana FC poster on his wall. He sees the billboard on the highway.

I stop at the penalty spot. I don’t get too close.

“You’re dropping your hands,” I tell him. I talk to him the way I talk to Danny in training.

Santi blinks. He looks down at his hands, hanging loose at his sides. “They’re heavy.”

“They’re supposed to be heavy. You’re carrying foam and latex.” I point at the ground. “Come here.”

He hesitates, then walks out to the spot. He barely comes up to my chest. He has Mari’s dark eyes, but his jaw is softer. He looks terrified and thrilled.

“You’re Cole,” he says.

“Yeah. You’re Santi.”

He nods.

“Let me see the gloves.”

He holds his hands out. The gloves are cheap replicas from a sporting goods store. The plastic spines in the fingers are stiff. The velcro straps around the wrists are fastened loose.

I reach out and undo the right strap, then pull it tight across the joint and lock the velcro down hard. I do the same to the left.

“You need the wrist locked,” I tell him. “If the strap is loose, a hard shot will bend your hand back and sprain your wrist. The glove is a cast. It’s supposed to restrict you.”

Santi flexes his fingers. The tight straps make his hands look bigger. “It feels tight.”

“You’ll get used to it.” I look at the goal behind him. “You want to stop the ball or do you want to look at airplanes?”

He looks at the grass. “I’m not fast enough to stop the ball.”

“You don’t need to be fast. You just need to know the geometry.” I walk past him into the six-yard box. The dirt is packed hard. I dig the heel of my boot into the center of the goal line and drag it forward, carving a straight line in the dust out to the top of the small box.

“Stand on the line,” I say.

Santi walks over and stands on the mark.

“If you stand in the middle, and you take two steps forward, you’ve cut off thirty percent of the shooting angle.” I walk out to the edge of the penalty area and pick up a scuffed ball sitting in the weeds.

I turn around, standing fifteen yards away. I’m a professional striker in his eyes right now. I hold the ball in my hands.

“Hold your hands up. Chest high. Palms facing me.”

He lifts his arms. The oversized sleeves slide down to bunch at his elbows.

“Make a W with your thumbs and index fingers.” I demonstrate with my own large hands. “Thumbs together. Fingers spread. Never try to catch it underhand. The ball will bounce off your chest and go right to the striker.”

He touches his thumbs together.

I drop the ball to the grass. “I’m going to kick it right at your chest. Don’t move your feet. Just catch it.”

Santi braces himself. He squeezes his eyes shut for a second, then forces them open.

I step into the ball. I don’t use power. I just punch it with the inside of my foot, a clean pass that leaves the grass and floats straight at his sternum.

It hits his hands. He stumbles backward a half step from the impact, but his thumbs hold the shape. The ball stops dead against his chest.

He looks down at it, shocked.

A grin breaks across his face. It changes his expression. He stops looking like a skinny kid in an oversized shirt and looks like a goalkeeper.

“Do it again,” he says. He tosses the ball back to me. It’s a weak throw that bounces three times before it reaches me.

“Throw it overhand,” I correct him. I trap the ball under my sole. “A keeper never lobs it. You throw it like a baseball pitcher. Drive it on a line so the defender doesn’t have to wait for it.”

We spend the next forty minutes doing basic maintenance. I don’t teach him how to dive. He doesn’t need to know how to throw himself at the ground yet. I show him how to keep his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, not his toes. I show him how to read the hips of the guy taking the shot, then roll the ball to his left and make him step into it, scooping it up with one knee dropping to the dirt to block the gap.

He’s clumsy. His limbs don’t coordinate the way his brain wants them to. But he doesn’t quit. He misses three low rollers in a row and chases them down into the torn net every time without complaining.

I stand at the top of the box with my hands on my hips. I feel solid. The pitch is a language I’ve spoken since I was his age. A ball has a trajectory. A body intercepts it.

“Last one,” I call out. “High and to your right. You have to move your feet.”

Santi gets set. He wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of the plastic glove, leaving a smear of dirt across his eyebrow. He holds his hands up. The W.

I chip the ball. It arcs up into the white sky, drifting toward the right post.

Santi shuffles sideways. His footwork is terrible, he crosses his legs and almost trips, but he gets his body in front of the flight path. He reaches up.

The ball hits his fingertips, pops up, and drops down behind him. It rolls over the chalk line into the net.

He groans and drops his hands to his knees.

I walk into the box. I pick the ball out of the net. “Why did you miss it?”

“I tripped.”

“You missed it because you waited for it to come to you,” I say. I hold the ball out. “You always attack the ball in the air. You jump and meet it at its highest point. If you wait for it to come down, you’re reacting. You never let the ball dictate the timing.”

He nods. He’s going to try to do it in his game next week and he’s going to fail, but he will know why he failed.

“Go get some water,” I tell him.

He jogs off toward the bleachers. I follow him slower. The sun is starting to drop below the treeline at the edge of the park. The temperature cools just a fraction, the heavy air moving a little.

Mari is still sitting on the aluminum bench. Her coffee cup is empty. She hands Santi a plastic Gatorade bottle. He squirts half of it into his mouth and spills the rest down his chin onto the yellow jersey.

He looks at me. “Are you coming to my game on Tuesday?”

I look at Mari. She’s watching me. The assessment isn’t over, but the lines have relaxed. She isn’t holding herself quite as tight.

“I have training on Tuesday nights,” I say. “I can’t miss it.”

Santi’s face falls. He looks down at his cleats.

“But I don’t have training on Saturday morning,” I add. “When do you play?”

He looks back up. “Ten o’clock. Out at the sports complex on 71st.”

“I know where it is.” I reach out and tap the side of his oversized jersey. “Tape your wrists before the whistle. Don’t drop your hands.”

“I won’t.” He turns and starts kicking the soccer ball back and forth between his feet, wandering off toward the edge of the parking lot to wait by the car.

I stand by the bleachers with Mari. The silence between us is comfortable.

“You didn’t let him save the last one,” she says.

“If I let him save it, he thinks he has it figured out. He stops thinking about his feet. You have to leave them with a problem to solve or they get bored.”

She picks up her empty coffee cup and stands up, looking up at me.

“He’s never listened to anyone about sports for more than five minutes,” she says. “His dad tried to teach him baseball once. Yelled at him for throwing like a girl. Santi put the glove in the trash can and never went back outside.”

“Baseball is a boring game.”

Mari smiles. A quiet smile that reaches her dark eyes. “Thank you, Cole.”

“He just needed to know where to stand.”

“I know.” She touches my arm. Her fingers are light against the sleeve of my t-shirt. A brief, casual contact.

She turns and walks toward the parking lot where Santi is trying to balance the ball on his head.

I watch them go, listening to the ball hitting the asphalt. I pick up my own empty coffee cup from the bleacher and crush it in my hand.

I peel the soaked tape off my left wrist in one long gray strip and drop it in the bin on top of the pre-wrap.

The cold air in here is heavy with deep heat rub. I sit and look at the gray grout between the tiles. I’m stalling. I do it every day now.

The shorts did their job all session, the seam grinding that same wrong static into me on every plant and dive. I sit with my knees wide, the old spread, making room for a mass that isn’t there anymore, and hold the posture for the room.

Gary walks past my locker pushing a canvas laundry cart. He’s the kit manager. He’s been with Arkana for twelve years, a guy who lives on stale coffee and nicotine pouches, and his job is to wash the club gear. Usually, you drop your practice shorts in the mesh bin in the center of the room and Gary has them clean and folded in your locker by seven the next morning.

I can’t use the bin anymore. If I drop a pair of size-small spandex compression shorts into the club laundry, Gary notices. If I drop shorts with vaginal discharge on the inner thigh seams, Gary reads the fabric. He’d know something was off. So I’ve been smuggling my own underwear out of the building. I roll the sweaty spandex up inside my dry towel and shove them into the bottom of my duffel bag. I wash them at home instead.

It’s exhausting. The logistics of the lie take up more mental space than reading the opposition’s corner routines.

“You were getting off the line fast today, skip.”

It’s Danny, standing a few lockers down, toweling his hair. He watched me the whole scrimmage.

“The push-off is fine,” I tell him. I unlace my left boot. The plastic studs are worn down asymmetrically.

Danny nods. He leans against the metal lockers. He had the job for two months and gave it back. He wants me to give him some profound advice about recovery. He wants to know how I shattered my femur in three places and came back jumping eight percent higher than preseason.

I don’t have anything for him. I can’t tell him the Lattice is a smart-material mesh that healed the bone by pulling dormant estrogenic markers from my fat cells.

“You drop your hands too early when the winger cuts inside,” I say instead. “I watched you do it twice in the small-sided drill. Keep the W shape high. Don’t let the ball dictate your timing.”

Danny looks at his hands. “Right. Got it.” He grabs his shower caddy and walks away.

I take a breath and let my head drop forward for a second. The low hum in my right femur is there, a mechanical insect noise vibrating deep in the bone. It clicks into a rhythm with my pulse.

I stand up. My left knee pops. I pull my practice jersey over my head and toss it into Gary’s laundry cart as he rolls it back down the aisle. My chest is bare, the hair, the hard muscle under it, the shoulders that fill a goal.

I keep the practice shorts and the compression spandex on. I grab my towel and walk toward the shower block.

The block is a large room with white tiles and showerheads in the middle. There are no stalls. There are no curtains. It’s a loud, physical, space, nobody watching anybody. Guys walk in, strip down, wash off the grass and the rubber turf crumb, and walk out. You don’t stare at anyone, but you don’t hide either.

The water is running hard, steam filling the tiled room. Three guys are already in there. I don’t look to see who they are.

I walk barefoot across the slick floor. There are tiny black rubber crumbs from the training turf scattered near the drains. I pick the showerhead in the far back corner, facing the wall.

I turn the tap to scalding. The spray beats down on my back and the back of my neck.

I stand close to the tiles. I look at the grout lines. They’re stained a yellowish brown near the floorboards. I reach down and push the practice shorts and the spandex down my thighs, letting them drop into a wet pile on the tiles.

I’m bare, keeping my back to the room.

I run the pink club soap over my chest. The calluses on my palms catch on the hair of my forearms. I move my hands down over the ridges of my abs. Same body down to the waist, and then it isn’t. I reach between my legs and my calloused hand slides over the wet folds, the soap stinging the inner skin, and I do the maintenance and nothing else. I squeeze my eyes shut and let the scalding water run over my head, trying to drown out the nerves firing in my groin.

“Defense looked sloppy in transition today.”

Chad’s voice cuts right through the noise of the water.

My heart hammers. Adrenaline, cold, hits my blood.

He steps under the showerhead directly to my right, less than four feet away, washing his hair, his eyes closed against the suds.

I don’t turn around. I keep my hips locked toward the corner, squared to the blue tiles.

“Chad,” I say over the spray. My voice sounds harsh in my own throat.

“I couldn’t get the back line to push up,” he says. He rinses his face, sputtering water. He turns slightly toward me. “Louisville was dropping balls right into the gap.”

I have to answer him. If I stay silent, it’s weird. If I don’t look at him when I talk, it’s weird.

But if I pivot my body, the lie ends. The absence of male anatomy will be right there under the flat fluorescent lights. I will be exposed to my center half, to the room, to the club.

I turn my head. Just my neck and the top of my shoulders. I keep my heavy legs planted, my pelvis angled hard toward the wall.

“You were dropping deep because you were tired,” I tell him. “You played ninety on Saturday. Tell the midfield to press higher so you don’t have to cover the space.”

Chad wipes the water from his eyes. He looks at my face. He doesn’t look down. Men don’t look down in the showers. That’s the one rule buying me time right now.

“Yeah. Maybe,” Chad says. He reaches for a bottle of shampoo on the wire rack. “You think Doyle is going to start Danny for the cup match on Wednesday?”

“Doyle cares about clean sheets and nothing else. If Danny looks good in training tomorrow, he’ll start.”

Chad grunts and turns back to his own showerhead.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. The muscles in my lower back are locked tight from holding the twisted posture. The right femur aches, a dull pressure deep in the marrow.

I finish rinsing. I need the towel. It’s hanging on a metal hook two feet to my left.

I reach sideways, grabbing at the rough terrycloth. I pull it off the hook, bring it in front of me and wrap it around my waist before I shift my feet. I secure the tuck at my hip, the fabric overlapping.

Only then do I turn around.

Chad is still under the water. Another guy is leaving the room, his wet footprints tracking across the gray floor tiles.

I walk out of the shower block. The cold air in the main locker room hits my wet shoulders.

I go straight to my bench and sit down. I’m exhausted. It isn’t the physical fatigue from the two hours on the training pitch. It’s the watching. Holding the borders of my own body shut all day takes more out of me than diving for crosses ever did.

I pull clean boxer briefs out of my duffel bag. I put them on under the towel. I drop the towel and pull on my stiff jeans. The cotton of the boxers sags in front, an empty pocket of fabric where it used to pull tight.

I pull a gray t-shirt over my head. I’m dressed. The architecture is hidden again. Safe for another twenty-four hours.

I check my phone. There’s a text from Mari.

Santi says he taped his wrists.

I stare at the screen. I type Good, and hit send.

I pick up my duffel bag and walk out to the player lot. The sky is a flat, blown-out white. The heat outside is oppressive. The pavement shimmers in the distance.

I climb into the truck and get the AC going and sit a second with my hands off the wheel.

Fifty-one days left. I place my right hand on my thigh, over the pink surgical seams hidden beneath the denim. The mesh hums.

I put the truck in gear and pull out onto the road. I’m doing the work. I just have to wait it out.