Aaron Feldstein

It is a Saturday where I am, the middle of the day, and the light on the screen is the same flat light it has been all morning. I have been scrolling for an hour without reading anything. The page is called vessel.cards. It has a wheel on it, and I have thought about this for years: the films, the stories, the threads at two in the morning about waking up in someone else's hands. I never believed anyone could sell it. I pay. I spin. The wheel slows on a man in Phoenix, and it is evening there, a Friday, late enough to be alone with it.

Then I am standing on a sidewalk.

The leash handle is a hard plastic curve in my right hand. Cool air, dry, a smell of cut hedge and warm concrete giving back the day. The dog has her nose in the shrubs. She looks up past the hedge at me with her ears flat. The line goes slack because my hand has stopped. I wind it twice around my knuckles and start walking. She has to learn the stride.

The jacket collar scratches my neck. Canvas, stiff, and the pocket under my thumb has a small square patch. A flash: a closet, early, a wife's shape asleep under the sheet, and his hands doing up the zipper quietly so as not to wake her. Three kids down the hall. He feels dread and tenderness together, and the tenderness is not mine.

The hoodie under it is soft from washing. I tug the cuff and get a different afternoon: a trench, the mini excavator ticking as it cools, spoil piled high, a sun so white it flattens everything. His back aches there. It aches now too, low, a worn-in ache, the kind that has a name in his head and no complaint attached. He is thirty-six and his knees know it.

The ring is a plain band, warm and slightly loose. I turn it with my thumb. A kitchen, a candle on a Friday, his wife's hands over her eyes, a blessing half-remembered in his mouth. Under it, the other thing: a recent ex, a name he does not say, a text he typed and deleted at a red light. Whisky in a glass at the end of the night, and the old tightness in the chest where cigarettes used to live. He quit. He still reaches.

The beard is thick against my jaw. My shoes are soft and worn through at the heel. The leash hums as the dog pulls. I am tall in a way I have no practice at. Everything is mine to feel and none of it is mine to know.

I stop under a porch light. I hold up my left hand and turn it over. Calloused, steady, a pale line of skin where the ring sits. Then I lift my eyes and say, to nobody, in his low rough voice:

"Okay. Okay, you're mine."

The dog watches me. I do not know if this is an hour or four minutes. I do not know when the wanting comes back.