Brett Halloran

The court reporter's chair is too small for the body I'm in, the way it's been too small since the moment I woke up in it, and this morning the smallness finally says something. Marcos Villanueva's fingers hover over stenotype keys that aren't moving, in a deposition room in San Francisco, and nobody notices because a court reporter sitting still just looks like a man waiting for someone to finish a sentence. He is skinny fat, soft in the middle, a stranger's ex-husband's voice still ringing somewhere behind these ears from a fight I lived through two spins ago and never finished feeling. I have been him less than a minute of his life. It is not boredom exactly. It's that the room smells like recycled air and toner and I already know every word the lawyer is about to say, because I have sat in rooms like this whole lives now, in whole men, and none of them have stayed long enough to matter, and the wheel is still the only door in the house. I take out my phone under the table. vessel.cards loads the way it always loads, patient, unbothered, a wheel rendered too smooth to be anything but a lie that works. I spin without deciding to. That's the part I never say out loud.

The leash slackens in a heavier hand than the one I had a half-second ago. Weight comes down through me all at once — a wide chest, thick forearms, boots planted wide on a sidewalk with a smell of cut grass and hedge and something charred and mineral underneath, like a held breath of a job that isn't here right now but lives in the skin anyway. A dog looks up at me, ears back, reading something in a face I haven't caught up to yet. My hand — his hand — winds the leash twice around itself before I've told it to. It knows this motion better than I know anything.

The T-shirt is doing most of the talking before I've thought a single thought as him. It's soft with washing, thin at the collar, and touching my own chest through it drops me into a bedroom with blackout curtains and a ceiling fan clicking on its third setting, a woman's shape still warm in the sheets, three kids' voices already going in the kitchen like a radio left on. Brett. The name arrives with the shirt, not from anywhere else — Brett Halloran, and Jenna saying it the way she says it when she's already handing him a travel mug he won't drink from because he doesn't drink coffee, hasn't in years, vapes instead, the little device warm in a coverall pocket that isn't on him right now but that his fingers still twitch toward out of habit. The leash handle in my palm brings the whole morning before this one: the alarm at an hour that isn't really morning at all for him, four-on-four-off, the mine schedule bent sideways against a family that runs on daylight without him half the time. He came off shift, showered the grit down the drain in long gray ropes, and instead of sleeping he took the dog out because Jenna asked and because sitting still is worse than moving when the inside of his head gets loud, which the doctor has a name for and a small orange bottle for, on the shelf, taken most days, not today, today he forgot, and the leg under me is already going, a tight fast bounce he'd deny if you pointed at it.

The jeans carry the insignia before I even look down for it — not memory through cloth exactly, more a phantom weight on the right arm, a half sleeve inked in years ago at a shop off Colfax with two guys he doesn't call anymore, a shield and wings for a unit he served with before the mine, before Jenna, before any of it, and touching that forearm with my other hand drops me straight into a barracks smell that has nothing to do with Denver at all. Under the shirt there's a body that aches in the shoulders in a specific permanent way, mine-ache, cage-ache, the vibration of machinery that doesn't fully leave a man between shifts. Heavy through the middle, strong through the back, hands that know rope and rock and a headlamp strap better than they know a leash, and this leash is almost funny to him, comically small in a grip built for bigger.

He prays some days and not others and doesn't tell anyone which days are which. He loves three kids by name I don't have yet and one more coming, maybe, Jenna hinted last week and he hasn't said it out loud to anyone, not even himself, standing here. He is objectively fine, better than fine, the kind of money the mine pays out for what it costs a body to go down in that cage every day — and none of it touches the tightness behind his sternum that the little orange bottle is supposed to be handling. The dog tugs. Some other man's whole ordinary Monday, still warm, still going, and now it isn't his.

I look down at my hand on the leash. Thick knuckles, a callus map I didn't earn, dirt worked into the creases from a shift that ended hours ago in his time and none at all in mine. I turn it over like it might explain itself.

"Whose house is this," I say, out loud, to the dog, to the hedge, to nobody, and it isn't really a question about the house.