Bradley Kosinski

You are eight minutes into DeShawn Hargis, and it is not working.

The cab of the tow truck smells like a pine tree air freshener that gave up trying weeks ago, and the seat is set wrong for a body this long, knees too high, and outside the window Eastern Kentucky is a wall of black trees and one blinking light on a relay tower, and you are supposed to be doing something with the CB radio that DeShawn's hands know how to do and yours do not. His memories keep arriving sideways — a woman's laugh in a kitchen you've never stood in, the particular ache of a double shift, a beauty mark he checks in mirrors without meaning to — and none of it is unpleasant, exactly. It is just slow. It is a man's whole quiet life, and you already know how it goes, because you have done this eleven times now and the tenth minute is always where the shine comes off. You are not tired of him. You are tired of waiting to be someone new. Your thumb is already on your phone, the site loading in the dark cab, DeShawn's own hand doing it without much of a fight, because there isn't a DeShawn left in there to put up one.

You spin.

The wheel is still turning, a smear of color on a stranger's phone, when the weight changes.

You are on your back. That is the first wrong thing — a body that was face-down a breath ago, and now isn't, arms already folding themselves at the chest like someone laid you out for a viewing. The air is colder here than Kentucky, radiator-dry, and there's a thin cut of orange streetlight coming through a gap in dark curtains, laying itself across a ceiling you didn't choose to look at. Somewhere below and outside, distant and metallic, a train takes a curve on elevated rail and the whole building answers it in a low shudder that you feel more than hear. The body under you is heavier than DeShawn's, shorter, softer at the middle, and it exhales once, long, like it's been asleep for hours and has no plans to stop.

Then the sheets get their claim in first. Cheap cotton, worn thin in the middle from a year of one man's exact sleeping position, and it gives you a flash of him buying them — a Tuesday, a Target on Halsted, his wife holding up two options and him not caring which, saying "you pick," because he never cares which, about sheets or paint colors or where they eat, and that not-caring is its own kind of steadiness that she has learned to lean on.

His name arrives with the pillow against his cheek: Bradley. Somebody's voice saying it flat and Chicago, *Bradley, phone*, from the next room, years ago.

The wedding band is next — you feel it before you understand you're feeling anything, a slight cool weight on the fourth finger of a hand that isn't clenched, and it opens wide: a courthouse afternoon, her dress a color he still can't name right, cheap champagne after because that was the budget, and the specific, unglamorous relief of coming home every night since to someone who already knows all of it, the vape habit, the leg that won't quit, the mullet he swears he's going to cut and never does. Two years married and it still surprises him some mornings, whose hairbrush is on whose side of the sink.

The shirt he wore yesterday is still slung over the chair by smell alone — fluorescent-lit hours arrive with it, the checked one against a heavy chest, the low hum of two monitors, a login screen, a coffee going cold at 9:40 every single day of his adult life, the particular boredom of a job he is good at and does not love, the L train grinding past the window on a fixed, indifferent schedule that has become the metronome of his whole week. He remembers dressing for it that last morning: the cardigan pulled on over the shirt because the office keeps it cold, the belt cinched at a notch that's crept in twice this year, the glasses picked up off the nightstand and put on without looking, the loafers by the door already broken into the shape of his feet. None of it exciting. All of it his, down to the grain.

Underneath the memories, the body itself: heavy through the shoulders and gut in a way that makes turning over work, twenty-two years in it and none of them hard on it exactly, no injuries, no old breaks, just softness and a low, constant electrical hum in the right leg, already twitching now against the sheet though he isn't awake to notice, a habit going back to a nervous kid in a classroom who never got told to stop. The hair against the pillow is a shorter memory: bleach and a dare from a cousin, dark roots he keeps meaning to redo, a mullet he half-hates and would fight anyone who said so out loud.

You breathe him in — vape flavor gone stale in the back of the throat, cheap laundry soap, the particular smell of a man asleep in his own bed at an hour his body has decided, for no reason either of you will ever ask about, is night.

You open his eyes.

Streetlight, dark curtains, a wife's shape not beside him tonight — a shift somewhere, a memory not yet come — and your hand lifts off your own chest into the thin orange light, turning slow, the ring catching it once.

"The hell," you say, to no one, in his voice, "was I doing."