Anil Prabhakaran

The room is somebody else's apartment in a city you'll never see with these eyes. You're sitting on the edge of Marco Oyuela's bed — twenty-four years old, heavy through the shoulders, a nose that was broken once and never quite reset — and you've been him for three whole minutes, long enough to feel the specific dumb weight of him, the way his knees complain when he stands, the phone screen too bright in his big hand. It's not boredom that sends you back to the site. It's that you spun past somebody twenty minutes ago and only now, sitting in this stranger's body with his stranger's apartment humming around you, do you let yourself think his name. Dean Kovacevich. Bald, green-eyed, soft in the gut, a dentist in Las Vegas who you wore for three minutes exactly one spin before this one, and in those three minutes you did the thing you came back to do again: you opened his phone and you read, for the hundredth time in different bodies, the texts between him and a man he has hated since dental school for reasons that have nothing to do with teeth. You know Dean's side of it cold now. You want the other one.

You open vessel.cards on Marco's phone with Marco's thumb and you pay with Marco's card, and Marco — what's left of the idea of him — doesn't get a vote.

Breath goes even before you arrive, like a held note resolving. You are face-down, then you are not; an arm that was hanging off a mattress folds up onto a chest that is smaller than the one you just left, tighter, older in a different way. Streetlight comes through a gap in heavy curtains, gold and thin as a knife-blade. You roll onto your back in a posture this body has never once chosen for itself, and the first thing you know is a shaved head against a pillow, and the second thing is a wedding band, warm from his own skin, pressing a memory into the third finger of a hand you didn't ask for.

It comes in through the ring first. A gurdwara flower stall on Devon Avenue, cash changing hands, a woman laughing at something he said that wasn't even that funny, and the specific terror of putting a ring on in front of forty people who all know your mother. Sangeeta. The name arrives with the whole shape of her, not just a fact but a temperature — her elbow in his ribs during long speeches, the smell of her shampoo on a pillow that is, right now, under this head, empty on her side for going on six years, the sheets never quite rearranged back to two people wide.

The T-shirt against your back gives up the morning it was put on — reaching for it off a chair in the dark, not looking, because looking wakes you up all the way and he didn't want to be awake, not on a night like this one, working the overnight prep shift because the restaurant lost its day cook to a better kitchen and someone has to be the one who says fine, I'll take it, I don't sleep right anyway. Underneath that: a whole marriage's worth of nights he did sleep right, her breathing next to his, and how sleep became a different animal after, something you do face-down with an arm hanging off the edge because the bed is too wide for the shape one body makes in it.

The mattress under you gives back a daughter — eleven, thereabouts, asleep two rooms over on a school night, unbothered, unaware her father is three hours from a shift that will end with his knuckles smelling like garlic and burnt sugar no matter how many times he washes them. He loves that kitchen the way you love a job that hurt you and kept you anyway: the heat off the flat-top, the particular satisfaction of a ticket rail finally empty, forty-two years old and still able to move fast when it counts, knees be damned, the left wrist that clicks now when it's cold. Nothing wrong with him. Nothing anyone would point to. Just a man, average build, ordinary hands that know how to break down a case of chicken thighs without looking, and a body that carries an entire decade of grief the way it carries the wedding band — worn so long it isn't a decision anymore, it's just weight where weight has always been.

There is a rival in here too, small and specific, folded into a memory of a walk-in freezer and a shouting match over a stolen sous position eight years back, a man named Dean who left the industry for teeth and never once let Anil forget he'd won that argument by leaving. It's nothing. It's everything you came for. You feel, absurdly, close to something — like touching, through this stranger's chest, the underside of a grudge you've only ever held from the other man's side.

You lift the hand off your chest — his hand, the ring catching the last of the streetlight — and you turn it over slowly, watching it the way you watch weather.

"Small world," you say to the empty room, and you don't know yet if that's true, or how long you'll be here to find out.