Brett Carlson Moyer

You are standing in a dark yard outside a bunkhouse in Rural Texas, nearly midnight, in the body of Esteban Ruiz Salinas, and you have been him for less than a minute. You are already looking at the phone. The thing he could not do was simple. You reached for the Spanish his mother would have used on the porch, and nothing came. His mouth had it, his ear had it, and you had none of it. A man's whole childhood sat behind a door you were not given the key to. You thought of a voice calling him in to supper, and you wanted a body that kept no such doors shut to you. You tell yourself that is not a reason. You pay. You spin.

The car drifts a foot toward the line, and you are in it.

It comes in as the road: black asphalt, a dashed line pulling under the hood, dash glow on knuckles that are suddenly yours. You pull the truck straight in one smooth motion. Your hands come off the wheel and resettle lower and wider, because that is how you hold things, and your thumb is already on the signal stalk. It ticks for an exit that is not his. You don't know whose it is. You don't care yet.

Then the body fills in, heavy and warm. There is weight in the thighs and a belly pressed against the belt. The seat has shaped itself around him and now around you. Your scalp feels cool where the hair is thin. Stubble rasps when you swallow. You are six-three, and your knees are crowded against the dash.

His memories come only through what you touch.

The jacket first. Canvas, stiff at the cuffs, worn soft along the forearms. The collar rubs your neck, and with it comes the morning: standing in a bedroom, pulling the plaid shirt off a hanger because it was the one clean thing, thumbing buttons that strain a little across the middle now, and thinking *I should do something about this* the way he thought it every morning. He shrugged the jacket on in the doorway. The office smelled of carpet cleaner when he left it.

The wheel under your palms is cracked and sticky at the ten and two. A flash: a woman in this passenger seat, years ago, feet on the dash, laughing at something on the radio. His ex. He hasn't called her in a long time, but he still keeps her number. He feels it as a small bruise he presses on purpose, to check it's there. That is his, not yours, and it sits in your chest anyway.

Your right hand drops to your thigh. Denim, faded at the knee. He sat on a hard guest chair beside a widow once and read her policy aloud twice, slowly, because she asked. He did not say it was too late to change anything. He softened it, and she thanked him. He drove home that night feeling like a liar and a good man at once.

Your keys swing against the column. The ring's small weight sets off a savings account, a number he checks like a pulse, enough to get him out if he ever decided. He never decides. The jackets, the strip-mall office, the long dark road home: he wanted to be gentle with all of it and was only tired.

The exit sign slides up green in the headlights. You are three miles from a house you have never seen, and your heart goes steady in a chest not yours. You lift your right hand off your thigh into the dash glow. Freckles run across the back of it. You turn it over, and the palm is soft.

You look up into the mirror, then past it, into the dark.

"Let's see how long you last," you say, to the man whose mouth it is.

Somewhere under the wanting, already, the wheel is turning.