Alejandro Reyes Villanueva

You have watched the films for years. Body swaps, the stolen mornings, the mirror scene where the stranger touches a face. You have read the threads at two in the morning until the screen was the only light. Tonight is nothing: the day finished, the scrolling finished, a dull evening with nothing on it. The page is called vessel.cards and has a wheel on it. You did not believe it. You pay anyway, because wanting this has never had a price before. You spin. The wheel ticks down and stops.

Then there is no screen.

You are standing, leaning, one arm out. Your left hand is flat on a manila folder, its page half-turned between a thumb and a finger, and you are in the middle of turning it. The light is white and flat. Glass is on three sides, and the door beside you stands open. The air smells of carpet glue and burnt coffee. The weight on your feet is real, and so is the breath going out of you.

You turn the page wrong. The corner folds. You smooth it and turn it again, slowly, correctly. Then you check the next page, and the next, ten of them, each one confirmed, on a job your hands have done ten thousand times and have never once needed to check.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Cotton-poly, a little stiff at the collar, damp under the arms from the radiator by the window. The fabric against your back opens a morning. It is his hands, not yours, pulling it off the hook by the bedroom door because the other one is in the wash. A wife is asleep with her arm over her face. A small voice down the hall is asking for waffles. He is tired in a way that feels like a floor he has gotten used to. He buttons the placket with his thumbnail, because he has bitten the others down, and the thumb finds the ragged edge and presses it.

The belt buckle is cold through the cloth. Under it, a lanyard. Your fingers close on the card, and a different afternoon comes up. It is his first day in this building, with a photo taken against a gray wall, and him trying to look like a man who has managed before. He had not. He had learned it by being wrong in front of people. Now he is the one they come to, and it still surprises him every time they do.

The wedding band is warm and a little loose on the knuckle. You turn it and the whole of a kitchen arrives. It is late, the dishes are half done, and his wife is laughing at something he said. It is not a good joke. That is why it was funny. The feeling is plain and huge and has nothing to do with you.

Your collar slides against your throat, and under it the skin of the chest feels faintly raised where the ink is. Script, a name and a date. You do not read it. The sensation brings a different memory, a hot week, a chair, a needle, and a promise made to someone who was not yet only his past. It is another woman's name in a lighter ache. An old girlfriend, a long time ago, whom he still thinks of sometimes at red lights. He has never told anyone that. It sits in him quietly, like a coin in a coat.

The body underneath all this is thirty years old and holds up. The knees are fine. The lower back has a dull note from the chair. The shoulders are strong from nothing in particular, just from carrying children and bags. The jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and the hair brushes the tops of your ears. Your stomach is empty. Your pulse is steady, and it is a stranger's pulse, and it is yours.

Through the glass, someone passes and glances in. They see a manager reading a file. You straighten. The back remembers how.

You lift your hand off the folder and look at it. The nails are bitten short, ragged at the thumb. The ring catches the light. You turn the hand over, then back. It moves exactly as you ask.

Then you look up, and you say, quietly, to the glass and whoever is in it: "Okay. Okay, it worked."

You do not know how long this lasts. It could be years. It could be before the page is finished turning. The wanting is already stirring somewhere behind his ribs, patient, not yours or his, and you stand very still in his shirt and wait to find out.