Aaron Dietz

Three minutes is nothing, and that's the problem.

You are Terrence Boykins, standing in his dark barracks room in Houston, and you can feel exactly how little of him you've used. The muscle in his shoulder wants to move, wants a rifle in it or a hand of cards or somebody to argue with, and instead it's holding still at almost midnight while everyone in this life is asleep and you are wide awake inside a man who has nothing to do. Thirty-seven years, mixed heritage, a cleft chin you keep almost-feeling when you breathe, and none of it is yours yet, none of it will ever really be yours, because you already know what happens next. You paid for the wheel. The wheel doesn't care that you just landed. It only cares that you're still logged in.

You tell yourself it's curiosity. It's always curiosity, until it's the same thing twenty-nine times over and you have to call it something else. You open the site on a phone that isn't yours, on a bed that isn't yours, and you spin.

The fork is halfway to your mouth and then it isn't going anywhere. It comes back down to the counter on its own, sets there with a small plastic click against the container's rim, and you feel the coat still on your shoulders — heavy, canvas-stiff, cold at the cuffs — before you feel anything else. Kitchen light, dim overhead can, a window gone black with the high desert on the other side of it. You are standing at a counter that is not level, the whole trailer settled a half-degree wrong on its blocks years ago and never fixed, and your body — this body, six feet of it, wider through the shoulders than you have any memory of being — shrugs the coat off in one motion like it's done it four thousand times, and sits at the little table, and starts eating again in even mouthful after even mouthful, looking at nothing in the window glass but your own outline.

The coat coming off is the first key. Carhartt canvas, oil at the cuffs that won't wash, and it opens into a man named Aaron who bought it nine years ago at a hardware store in Elko and wore it until it stopped being a jacket and became a fact about him. Under it a gray zip hoodie, and under that the memory of getting dressed this morning — not this morning, some morning, all of them folded into one: the beanie pulled down over ears that get cold before the rest of him does, the same three drawers in the same order, wedding band already on because it never comes off, not for work, not for the shower, not for anything. Nineteen years married. Her name comes with the ring — Denise — and with it a kitchen smell that isn't this kitchen, a house they don't have yet, a house they're saving for out of a management salary and a discipline that looks, from outside, almost frightening. Millionaire on paper. Trailer on the ground. He likes it that way. He tells people at the office, when they ask why he still drives the same truck, that money you don't spend is the only kind that's actually yours.

The toothpick is in the pocket of the hoodie, worn soft at one end, and your jaw wants it the second you notice it's not in your mouth — an old habit standing in for the cigarette he never let himself start. Church on Sundays, when he isn't on a shift that eats the morning. A glass-walled office in a building an hour from here, door always open, because he learned a long time ago that a manager who closes his door is a manager people stop trusting. He is fair and he is exacting and he has fired two people in eleven years and lost sleep over both. He is standing at this counter at whatever hour this is because the schedule doesn't care what the sun is doing, and Denise is asleep down the short hall, and there was an ex once — Kayla, a name that comes with a sting still in it after all these years, a version of his twenties he doesn't examine too closely — and none of that matters right now, none of it is why you're here.

You're here because three minutes wasn't enough, and this — the weight of an actual grown man's shoulders, the ache low in the back from a day spent standing, the mole on the cheek you can feel like a coin under your own borrowed fingers — this is enough, for now, to make the wanting go quiet.

The container's empty. You set the fork down soft, the way he would.

You look at the hand on the counter — broad, a little rough, the band on it plain gold and warm from his own skin — and you turn it once, like you're checking it's real.

"Didn't even taste it," you say to the window, to nobody, and your voice comes out lower than you expected, and you don't know yet how long you get to keep it.