Brendan Suchocki

You are standing at Darnell Osei's kitchen window with his phone still warm in his hand, looking at the Sunday light going orange over Lake Shore Drive, and you feel the seven minutes of him sitting on you like a coat that doesn't fit yet. Good job. Good arms. A text thread open from somebody named Priya that you haven't earned the right to answer. None of it is yours. That's the thing nobody tells you about a body that's doing well — it doesn't feel like winning, it feels like standing in somebody's front hall in your socks, waiting to be caught. You didn't spin again because Darnell was bad. You spun again because he was fine, and fine is unbearable when you know there's a wheel in the other room that owes you a different Sunday. You open the laptop. You go to vessel.cards. You pay. You spin.

The shelf is cool particleboard under your palm and there are four boxes of the same wireless headphones not quite squared to the edge, and your hand — his hand — is already moving to fix it before you've finished arriving. The motion comes out wrong, a box turned the wrong face out, and you feel the wrongness land somewhere that isn't thought, a kind of itch behind the sternum, and you do it again, slow, correct. Then the next ten boxes, each one checked, each one deliberate, on a job that announces itself to you as something this body has not had to check in years. Afternoon light is coming low and hard through the window at the end of the aisle, throwing a trailer-shaped shadow across the floor tile. A scanner gun hangs heavy in your right hand by its strap, your left hand flat against a box of Vankyo headphones. A vest, unzipped, pulling slightly at your shoulders. You are shorter than you were a minute ago, and softer somewhere you weren't, and a weight is on your left ring finger that catches the light when you move.

The vest is the first thing that talks to you. Polyester, a little static against the shirt underneath, and it gives you a locker room smelling of coffee and floor cleaner, a guy named Hutch who covers your Thursdays, the particular ache of clocking in at six when you wanted to clock in at nine. Then the shirt — black, thin, worn soft at the collar — gives you more, because the shirt remembers this morning better than you do: standing in the trailer's narrow bedroom with the blinds throwing bars of white across the bed, Carolyn still asleep with one arm over her eyes, and you pulling this same shirt over your head one-handed so the dresser drawer wouldn't creak. The jeans remember the drive in, the heat already coming up off the highway at nine in the morning, the radio on a station that plays nothing you like because it's the only one that comes in past the Shell station. The boots remember standing, four years of standing, the left one a half-size loose because you bought them in a hurry after the old pair split.

The ring is the one that opens wide. Fourteen years of it — Carolyn in a dress she altered herself because the shop in town quoted too much, the two of you on the patio of a casino buffet afterward because that was what you could afford and neither of you cared, you remember not caring, you remember being sure. And under that, not guilty exactly, just present, the shape of Dana — the ex, gone eleven years now, a name that still surfaces when a particular song comes on, a woman who wanted a different kind of life than the one you built in a single-wide with sagebrush up to the step. You don't reach for her. She's just there, the way a scar is there.

Your body tells you things nobody asked it to. Forty-three and skinny in the arms, soft through the middle in the way that happens to a man who used to play ball and now mostly stands. A low ache low in the back from the stockroom lift yesterday. The leg — your leg, his leg, you don't have the seam yet — has started bouncing against nothing, heel tapping the tile in a rhythm that was happening before you got here and doesn't stop for you now. Hands that know this shelf blind: the angle to tilt a box so the barcode faces out, the two-finger push that squares a row without looking. A tongue that quit the cigarettes six years ago and still sometimes wants one at 3pm exactly, like now. A body built for standing eight hours and praying for the chair.

You look down at your hand on the headphone box, broad across the knuckle, the gold band catching the window light, a hand that has tightened car seats and signed a mortgage and held a rosary at a funeral you don't have the memory of yet, only the ache where it should be. You turn it over once, like checking it's really yours, the itch behind the sternum gone quiet now that the row is straight.

"Didn't even feel that," you say, to the empty aisle, to the trailer-shaped shadow on the floor, and you don't know yet if that's a complaint or the nicest thing anyone's said all week.