Anil Choudhury

You are standing at a hotel-room window in Joey Larkin's body, forty seconds old, and the radiator under the glass is knocking. Below you a bus sighs at a corner. Your knuckles are bruised from a fight he must have had. Your stomach is full of someone else's pizza. Everything in him is young and loud and hungry, and none of it is yours.

He has a phone on the sill with eleven messages from a woman called Dee, unopened. You do not open them. You know it is not Joey you are tired of. He can run for miles and sleep anywhere, and you wanted to be him until the minute you were. What sent you back is smaller than that: you stood in his shower and could not make yourself stay. The hot water ran and you kept thinking that somewhere a man was being tired in a way you had never had. So you open the page, put your thumb on the wheel, and watch it turn.

The highway comes in all at once, dark, with a hum under your seat. Dash glow lies on your knuckles. Your hands are at ten and two and the car has drifted a foot toward the line, so you pull it back in one smooth motion. Then both hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because that is how you want to hold it. Your right finger finds the stalk and the signal ticks on for an exit that is not his.

The jacket is the first thing that talks. The cuff drags on your wrist, and a morning opens: a hook by a back door, a wife's voice from the kitchen saying take the heavy one, it is going to be cold. He zipped it to the throat and felt the weight of the keys in the pocket. A daughter's drawing was folded in there too, a bird in orange crayon, and his chest goes warm and tight around it.

The wheel is cold, worn smooth where his thumbs go. It gives you winters of ladders, the rungs biting through boot soles, cable cold as a rope of ice, and a pole at six a.m. with the L rattling overhead. It gives you pride in a clean line run to a stranger's roof. The ring is on your left hand, and when your thumb turns it there is a wedding: marigolds, smoke, a hot hall, and her laughing at him with her whole face.

Your scalp itches. You run a palm over it, over bare warm skin, without deciding to. You do it the way he does when he is worried, and he is worried about money, and about the daughter's tooth, and about the hour. The body is short and dense and forty-three. There is an ache low in the back and a clean strength in the forearms. Your stubble rasps against your lip.

The exit sign swings up green. You look at your hands, turn them over, and the ring catches the dash light.

You lift your eyes to the dark and say, "Well. Hello."

The signal keeps ticking. You do not know how long he stays yours.