Brendan Kosinski

The evening is nothing, which is the point. Screen light, the day already used up, a page you have bookmarked for a year and told yourself was a joke. Tonight it isn't. VESSEL.CARDS loads slow on a bad connection, a wheel rendered in gold on a black field, and underneath it a button that just says SPIN, like it's daring you to mean it. You have wanted this since you were a kid making yourself dizzy with the idea of it — not a costume, not a dream, the actual inside of somebody else. You have never had a body to leave, never had anything to lose by trying. You pay. You spin. The wheel does what wheels do and then it stops, and there is no drumroll, no screen — just a jolt like a missed stair, and rain.

It is on your skin before you know you have skin again. Cold rain, real rain, hitting an eye that is open and does not blink fast enough. Your arm is already up over your head, uselessly, the way anyone's would be, and the air above you is white and too bright and roaring. The ground takes the whole of you at once. Then it lets go. You are sitting up in a motion no body makes on its own after that, shoes smoking faintly at the soles, and you get your feet under you and stand in the middle of an open car park like you have simply stumbled and caught yourself, rain running down a face that isn't asking any of the questions it should be asking.

The shirt is the first thing. Wet gray cotton dragging cold against a back and shoulders built wider than you expected wearing wider than you're used to, and touching it — just the fact of touching it, arms still lowering from over your head — gives you a hand pulling this exact shirt off a hanger this morning, a bedroom with the blinds half down, a woman's voice from the kitchen asking if he wants coffee in the thermos or just at the counter, and the ordinary click of *at the counter, thanks babe* leaving him without him thinking about it. Denise. The name comes with the coffee, unbidden, warm. Four years in that rowhouse together, her plants on the sill, the rent split down the middle because that's fair and he believes in fair.

The jeans give you standing at a dresser, one leg then the other, a body already sore in the shoulders from yesterday's pallets, the low familiar ache of it that isn't pain exactly, just cost, paid daily. Boots — these boots, on your feet now, soaked through — give you laces double-knotted out of habit from a warehouse floor that will take your foot off at the ankle if you get sloppy, four years of that too, the beeping of a forklift you've learned to place in space without looking, the particular grunt of a top shelf pull with your arms instead of your back like they taught you. Calluses along this palm that aren't decorative. A body that lifts for a living and lifts, off the clock, because it likes what lifting does to it, and the gap in the teeth you feel with your tongue before you feel it any other way, a small architecture he stopped noticing around age nine.

Something colder comes through the wet denim at the knee where he must have gone down hardest: a Sunday feeling, a church basement, the particular guilt of skipping two weeks running and meaning to go back, meaning it every single week. A can of something at six-thirty most evenings, the hiss of it, a cigarette he only wants when the beer's already in him, the small tired peace of a porch step and Denise's laugh through a screen door. Nothing he'd bring up if you asked him what's on his mind. No wound in him anywhere you can find, just weather, just wear, thirty-three years of ordinary weight sitting easy in a frame that carries it well.

The rain keeps coming down into a face still faintly startled, mouth open on a breath that isn't panicked, just recalibrating. You get his balance under you like trying on a stance, testing the knees, the give of them, and around you the parked cars sit patient and indifferent, wipers off, nobody having seen a thing. Somewhere past the lot a siren that has nothing to do with you rises and fades.

You lift both hands up in front of your face, turn them over in the rain, palm and back, palm and back, watching water run off calluses that took years to earn and that you have had for less than a minute. Then you look up, off the hands, into whatever is in front of you, and you say, in his voice, thick with something that isn't quite his fear —

"I don't — this isn't—" and then, quieter, not a question anymore, just a man hearing his own gap-toothed voice come out wrong to his own ears: "Okay."

Somewhere a wheel is still spinning for someone else. Not yet for you. You have him now, and there is no clock on it anywhere you can see.