Brendan Fischetti

The evening had no shape to it. That's the truest thing you can say about it. Work had ended the way it always ends, and you'd come home to the particular nowhere of a Monday with nothing in it, scrolling with your thumb doing the thinking, and somewhere in the fourth or fifth loop of nothing the ad found you again. It had found you before. You'd always closed it before. Body swap, it said, like it was a joke, like it was a game, and you had wanted this — not lately, not since some movie or some thread at two in the morning, but always, the kind of wanting that doesn't have a start date because it was there before you knew to name it. Waking up as somebody else. Actually being someone else, not pretending. Tonight you didn't close the tab. You typed in the number. You spun.

The wheel didn't even finish its turn before the floor changed under you.

You are mid-stride. That is the first thing — not a thought, a fact your legs already know — mid-stride on a path with water on one side of it, cold air going into a chest that is not the chest you left behind, and a foot coming down a half-second late, catching, not falling. The other foot takes the weight instead. Arms drop lower. Head doesn't move. Somewhere at the wrist a watch buzzes over a mile split it has no memory of you running, because you didn't run it, he did, up until four seconds ago, and now there is no more he to have done anything.

The cold hits first, actual cold, dawn cold, and it is so unlike your evening that for a second the two don't fit in the same world. Breath comes out in front of your face and hangs there. Earbuds sit warm and slightly greasy in ears that aren't ears you've ever had. There's a phone-shaped weight strapped to an arm, a shirt gone see-through with sweat down the sternum, a body that is heavier than any body has business feeling, dense through the middle, strong somewhere underneath that density, thighs pushing off a canal path like they've done this ten thousand times without being asked.

The shirt is what opens first. Navy, damp, clinging where the softness of him is, and touching it — being in it — gives you the closet it came out of, dark before the alarm, his wife still a warm shape under the sheet, the smell of yesterday's bar still faint in the fabric of the one he'd worn the night before, discarded on the chair. He'd pulled this one over his head one-armed, still half asleep, thinking about nothing, thinking maybe about the register count from last night, a few dollars off and he couldn't remember why. Sleeve past the elbow. He runs before anyone's awake because it's the only forty minutes of a day that don't belong to somebody else — not to the bar, not to three kids who wake up needing things in the specific order kids need things, not even really to his wife, who he loves in the unspectacular tired way of eleven years, though there's a name that surfaces alongside hers now too, a woman from before, more recent than eleven years, who he still thinks about on runs like this one when the water's flat and nobody's around to see his face do what it does. He never told anyone that. He barely told himself.

The watch gives you mile four, gives you the ritual of the split-check, the small private pride of a number. The earbuds give you a podcast voice mid-sentence about something he stopped listening to a mile ago. The shoes against the path give you the specific ache in his left knee that's been there two years and never seen a doctor, and beneath that, quieter, a pressure behind his eyes he's been told about at his last physical and ignored, a thing his doctor called a number and he called nothing, because thirty-eight is too young to think about that seriously, though this body would beg to differ if it could talk to you directly.

His hands, hanging loose at his sides with the rhythm of the run, want to go to his mouth. That's just what they do, unbidden, has done it since he was a kid at recess, since he was a bartender leaning on the rail during a slow Tuesday watching the door — the nails bitten close, a habit his wife has given up trying to break him of. There's a ring on the left one. Plain gold, warm from his own skin, and it gives you a wedding in a backyard, string lights, his father-in-law's terrible speech, her in a dress with dust on the hem by the end of the night because they danced on grass. It gives you three kids in overlapping loud fragments — a birthday cake, a car seat buckle that never sits right, a small hand fitted into this exact hand crossing a parking lot. It gives you the bar too, the one he tends, the particular stainless cold of the well before opening, bottles he could place blind, the small pouch of nicotine tucked behind his lip most afternoons, the two nights a month he drinks like he means it and regrets it exactly as much as he expects to.

None of it is yours. All of it is right there, sitting in a body that is thicker through the gut than you expected and stronger through the legs than that gut would suggest, dimples denting into his cheeks right now for no reason at all, just the shape his face rests in, a face that isn't asking anything of you because it doesn't know yet that it should.

The stride keeps going another step out of pure animal habit. Then it stops. Sneakers scuff to a halt on the canal path, dawn light flat and gold-gray on the water, herons somewhere, cold still smoking off your own shoulders.

You lift both hands in front of your face like you're checking they're real, turn the left one over, wedding band catching the early light, thumbnail bitten down to nothing.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, your breath still fogging. "Okay — this is actually real."

You don't know for how long. Nobody does. You just stand there on his path in his cold in his body, breathing his breath, and you let your eyes come up off your own hand and hold there, on nothing, on the water, on whatever's watching.