Brandon Aldous

You are standing at a forklift's controls, in the body of a man named Russell Kessler, and the pallet in front of you is the fourth identical pallet this morning. His knees ache on the climb down. His lower back is a rope pulled tight. You have worn him for less than a minute and already you know what he is: a good body, a tired one, a ledger of small refusals. The thing that sent you back is simple. You reached for a cigarette in his jacket and found his pocket empty, and the hand did not know what to do about it. The wanting went through you like a dropped tray. You do not want to be a man who can't. You open the site on his cracked phone, and the wheel is already turning.

Then there is cold wet air, and weight on your right shoulder that is not a pallet. A shovel, ash handle, worn smooth and a little greasy with rain. You are mid-step, one boot off the ground, and the ground is mud. A mini excavator ticks beside you, and coffee-shop light spills yellow across the wet sidewalk. The step is wrong, so you set the foot down again slowly, and it is right. You check the next motion, and the next, ten of them, each one tested, because you are not the one who has done this ten thousand times.

The handle first. Your palm closes on it and it opens: a hardware store in October, a man in an orange apron selling him this shovel for twenty-six dollars, and the pride of it, a thing bought new that was his. Then the shirt against your back, damp, stiff at the reflective bands. This morning: the long sleeve pulled over his head in a dark kitchen, the yellow shirt over it, the smell of the pack on the counter, one cigarette lit at the window while the rain started. His thumb knew the lighter. A prayer said half-mocking, half-meant, a Catholic habit that outlived the belief, a sign of the cross over a coffee cup. The jeans are heavy at the knee, stiff with dried clay, and in them: a knee on a cold floor, laying someone else's pipe, the first week on the crew, a foreman saying "dig where I point." His beard is wet and the barbell in his eyebrow is a small cold bead. He put it in at nineteen, drunk, in a friend's garage, and kept it because taking it out felt like losing something. No one waits at home. The apartment is a mattress, a hot plate, a rosary on a nail. Your chest has a smoker's rasp, shallow at the bottom, and your shoulders are strong, easy under load. His arms are tired in a way that feels honest.

You lower the shovel and look at your hands. Cracked knuckles, mud in the creases. You turn them over. They are not yours, and they are nobody's now.

You look up and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."