You lean your bike against the brick wall, canted on pannier and cobblestone, the tire fitted to the chink like a kickstand. The pub beckons with a scallop of diffuse light on a breath of stout, but literally too, its voice the bray of an old drunk man ay, and you'll be needing a cuppa in this damp air, or better yet, a Guinness. You are only too glad to get something hot or rough to warm you right, smooth the pickle out of your fingers, stopper the snot in your nose, and send blood back into your numbed seat. Twelve hours on the rolling road, the last two over those picturesque cobblestones, jack-hammering your rear end. As you walk to the bar, you know it is Friday, the men and women in better clothes, a collared shirt, a creamy sweater, comb lines still striating someone's red hair. You wish you were at least in your jeans, not sweat-rimed shorts. Three pints and that pair of jeans later, a whore's bath in the loo, you are not surprised when he starts to sing to you. The one in the creamy sweater and brown boots. Do you sing? he asks. Your No, but I'd like to, all the encouragement he needs for the ballads in the sweet tenor and all that will come after. His name, Declan Trainor, is also his livelihood, as it was for his father and grandfather and on back. The racehorses in Newry laid claim to his body in a way you never would — the white hooked scar by one eye, the stiff elbow, the curve of his legs an echo of their girth, his skin shell white from waist to toe. When you bring his fingers to your mouth, you can smell beneath the soap that liniment of horse sweat and hay dust and manure, the smell of summer on a Virginia farm. And maybe it is this scent of memory that leaves you nostalgic for his story. One of an implacable father, brothers flung around the world like clothes on the hotel room floor, a mother drowned after her ninth birth, her face reflected in the steam of the bathroom mirror, the knife in his boot to cut all ties. As he lies still in a tangle of sheets, you are unable to open the door to the street, so you climb out and up the fire escape. This is what you will yearn for as you flee across rooftops, before you return to your unscathed bike, the life you never lived.
Kristin Sherman lives in North Carolina with her two children and her dogs. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Pequin, and in anthology by Novello Press.