Anil Deshpande

You are standing at a sink in a break room in High-desert Nevada, in a janitor's body that has been yours for less than a minute. The knees ache with a flat, honest ache. The stubble on your jaw is rough against your knuckle. Blue eyes look back from the steel of the paper-towel dispenser. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He is a body in which you could mop this floor until the lights go out, and you would be tired in a way that means nothing. The mop bucket smells of pine and rust. The evening shift is coming on, and someone is laughing down the hall at something small.

You open the page on the cracked phone. The wheel is there, waiting and patient. You do not decide. You find you have already paid.

It turns. It ticks down. It stops.

The room goes white, and then you are sitting up straight in the dark. The television is the only light. The remote sits under your palm on the arm of the couch, and you put it down. A bright frame fills the screen, and in the glare you feel the whole new weight settle: thin, narrow, light in the shoulders. The air smells of something with cumin, cooled in a pan on the stove.

The couch is rough, a dense weave under your forearm. Your back finds the cushion and it opens a flash. It is a Tuesday, years ago. He is carrying this couch up three flights with a brother-in-law who keeps saying left, your left, and his wife is laughing at the bottom of the stairs with her hand over her mouth. He feels pride, plain and a little embarrassed.

The hoodie is soft at the cuffs, washed grey. Your thumb finds the frayed string, and it gives you the morning. He wore it because the shift had run long, ten hours of walking the racking with the scanner strapped to his wrist, forty thousand steps that left a burn in the arches. He pulled the hood over wet hair in the hallway and stood a second at the door. Somewhere behind it the kettle clicked off. Her voice said, eat something, Anil. He felt the whole day come loose and slide off him.

Your left hand moves on the cushion, and the ring is cool against the fabric. A hotter flash: the temple, the smell of marigolds, his own hands shaking as he held out the garland. He did not know until that moment how much he wanted this one thing to go right. It did. Under that comes something he never says, a small private fear that he will always be a man who walks the aisles and picks what other people ordered. He has never told her. Your chest remembers it as a tightness.

The sweatpants are warm at the thigh. Your feet are bare on the floor, and the boards are cold. Your knees are fine, and your lungs are clean, though your stomach is empty. A good body, in its way. A body no one has ever asked much of.

On the screen the joke lands, and the laugh track rises. His mouth would have gone with it. Yours does not.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. Dark skin, long fingers, the pale dent where the ring sits. You look up into the dark of the room, at the lamp, and then past it.

"Well," you say, in his voice, quietly. "Hello."

The screen flickers. You do not know how long this one lasts. It could be years. It could be the length of this show. Somewhere under the cumin and the cold floor, the wanting is already asleep, and you wait to learn how long it sleeps.