Arjun Devadas

The scar through Donald Mazzarella's eyebrow itches when you clench his jaw, which is a thing you've learned about him in three minutes flat — he does that without being told to, same as the other one, the blue-haired one, if the notes on the card are right. Funny, the habits men carry into rented bodies. You're standing in his kitchen in the dark, Philadelphia humming outside through a window with the blinds half down, and the silver in his beard catches the stove light like frost. Thirty-five years old. A machine operator's hands, thick-knuckled, a burn scar along one forearm that isn't yours and never will be. You spun once already tonight — three minutes ago, four — and it was enough. He was fine. He was *nothing*. Average height, average face, a body built like a shrug. You didn't dislike him. You just remembered, standing in his kitchen, that there's a wheel, and that you haven't spun it in eleven days, and eleven days is a long time to be the kind of man nobody looks at twice.

So you go back to the laptop glowing on his counter, the one he never closed, vessel.cards still open in the tab like he left a door unlocked for you on purpose. You don't even sit. You pay with his card, because by now it's not really his, and you spin.

—

The couch exhales under a weight it already had a second ago — not new weight, the same weight, except now it's being driven. There is a can of beer loose in a right hand, body-warm, sweating onto skinny fingers. A television is showing the end of something, a corner kick swinging in, a crowd noise too loud for the hour. Your jaw is closed around nothing. Your mouth was open a second before, dry at the back, and you feel the click of it shutting like a door remembering its latch. The goal has already happened. You missed it. Whoever was driving this body before missed it too, which is the first thing that feels strange and true at once — not you, but him, slack-faced right up until now, mouth open, asleep in front of the game he loves.

The ball goes in on the replay. Your thumb finds the remote without you asking it to, and the volume drops two clicks, precise, before you've even decided you want it quieter.

—

The can in your hand is a half-inch of warm Modelo, and holding it brings back a fridge door, grocery store fluorescents, a six-pack because the twelve was four dollars more and four dollars matters this month. It matters because a thirty-one-thousand-dollar year selling cars on a lot with balloons tied to every mirror doesn't stretch the way the dealership manager promised it would when he hired you off a car-guy Instagram account for your hair, of all things — "gives the lot personality," he said, like personality were a line item. The balloons are always popping in the heat. You've replaced forty of them this month alone.

The sweatpants against your legs — these exact sweatpants — remember being pulled on at six, after work, after the shirt came off sleeve by sleeve, the lanyard lifted over the head last of all, keys and photo ID clattering against your chest the whole day like a cowbell. The shirt's clean-pressed collar had chafed by two in the afternoon. The tie, clipped, never knotted properly since the one lesson your father gave you at seventeen, impatient, in a mirror in Artesia, both of you late for something. Your father's voice still lives in your hands when they touch a tie: *not like that, the fat end always wins.*

The mole on your cheek is a thing people mention on dates and never again after that, except her — Priya, six months, gone two months now — who used to trace it with a thumb like she was checking it was still there, every single time, like it might wander off. You feel the ghost-weight of that thumb and then you feel the apartment she isn't in anymore, this exact apartment, courtyard stucco and dead dry palms outside, her toothbrush gone from the cup by the sink and the gap where it stood somehow louder than the toothbrush ever was.

Your jaw aches faintly, clenched all day without your permission, same as it's clenching now. Twenty-three years old and already you grind your life down to powder at night. The body is skinny in a way that costs nothing to keep — you forget to eat on slow days, remember on good ones, when a sale goes through and the manager buys tacos for the floor. Your feet, bare against the carpet now, know the particular grit of a dealership lot at 2 p.m. in July through the soles of the brown shoes still sitting by the door, laces loose, the left one always looser since the eyelet started going. Your hands — thin-fingered, a callus starting at the base of the right thumb from keys, a hundred keys a day, fob after fob after fob — know how to coax a hesitant buyer two more minutes past where they wanted to stop listening. It is the only thing you're good at that anyone pays for.

The game keeps playing. Somewhere behind the couch the apartment is dead quiet, a Sunday gone to 2 a.m. without you, a whole life you did not choose to leave running on no sleep for a sales job that starts at nine whether you're rested or not.

—

You lift the hand with the can still in it and just look, turning it in the blue TV light, clenched jaw easing on its own for the first time all night.

"Hell of a goal," you say to no one, to the screen, to the empty apartment, and you don't know yet how long you intend to let him have been right about that.