Brett Halloran

The screen has been the same for an hour: a tab open, a wheel drawn in thin gold lines, a button that says SPIN in a font too polite for what it's selling. You have read about this for years — threads at two in the morning, stories you told yourself you were only curious about, the old daydream of walking around behind someone else's eyes. It was never real before tonight. Nothing on TV, nothing worth finishing, the apartment quiet in the specific way Sunday nights get quiet. You tell yourself it's probably fake. You pay anyway. You spin.

There is no fall, no falling — just a stumble that isn't yours, two steps that don't land, and then you are running.

Cold air first, more than you expected, needling in through a nose that isn't yours to breathe through. Grey light on water to your left, a canal, dead reeds, a heron somewhere you can't yet place as a heron. Weight is different — heavier through the shoulders, lower in the hips, a stride with its own opinion about where the ground is. Something buzzes at your wrist. A watch, recalculating a split it has no record of you ever running. Earbuds feed you a woman's voice reading out a pace you didn't ask for. Breath comes out in front of you in a little cloud and disappears.

It is dawn where his legs are. It is early evening where you were sitting a second ago, doomscrolling in a room with the blinds already down. You don't feel the gap. He won't feel anything at all.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — a thin technical layer, a heavier one over it, both damp already at the small of the back, and through that dampness comes a whole morning: an alarm at five-forty that he silenced without opening his eyes, the specific ritual of pulling the black base layer on first because the tag scratches if it goes on second, tugging the sage-green shell over it while the coffee maker ticked in the kitchen behind him. Sleeve by sleeve. His wife's voice, half-asleep, telling him to take his inhaler, and him saying he already did, and both of them knowing he was lying a little. A kiss against her hair that smelled like their pillow. The front door, the cold hitting his face like a held breath, the first quarter mile always the worst one, lungs tightening like a fist deciding whether to close.

His body comes in after the clothes do, in pieces, honest ones. Thirty-four years old and it shows exactly where thirty-four shows: knees that know this canal path's every camber, a right calf that's been tight since Thursday's practice, a chest that pulls a half-second short of full on the inhale — the asthma, old and managed, a shape he's learned to run inside of rather than fight. Strong everywhere else. Shoulders built by twenty years of mat time, forearms that have hip-tossed two hundred pounds of teenage boy without thinking about it. A ring on the left hand, plain gold, warmed by his own skin before it was ever yours. Nails bitten close on both hands — has been since he was a kid, worse in tournament season, worse still since March.

March. The ring keeps giving: a wedding on a lawn in Altadena, his father-in-law's toast running eleven minutes too long, his wife laughing at him across the aisle for crying at his own vows. And under that, unwilling, another year — a woman who isn't his wife, a name he doesn't let himself think except that right now, running, he can't stop it: Danielle, a drive to Ventura that shouldn't have happened, six months that ended before Christmas and that he has told exactly no one, that sit in him now like a stone he swallowed and is still waiting to pass. He loves his wife. He has never once told her about the stone. The whistle isn't around his neck this morning — that's a different day, the gym, mats laid out under buzzing fluorescents, boys in singlets he calls by last name, a daughter's height chart taped inside a locker he uses for nothing else. She is four. She calls the wrestling room "Daddy's room" and thinks that's a joke.

The tattoo at his collar doesn't need touching, it's just there against his own skin, warm — a skull wound in roses, done at nineteen with a fake ID and a worse decision-making process, faded now the way American traditional fades, softer than it was, still bold where it counts. He got it the same week he quit smoking the first time. It took him three more tries after that.

The chest tightens again, a real pull this time, mile four announcing itself the way it always does, and some old-brain part of him you're standing inside of reaches automatically for a pocket that isn't there this morning — the inhaler's at home on the nightstand, he decided he didn't need it, he was wrong, he is always a little wrong about that and always fine anyway.

You slow. Not because you decided to. Because his legs, which know this, ease off half a beat before his mind would have admitted to needing it.

You look down at your hands — his hands, blunt-nailed, a plain band catching the grey light, a stranger's hands doing a stranger's habit of curling slightly at the knuckle like they want something to bite.

You lift them, turn them over once, and you say, out loud, to no one on the empty towpath, in a voice that isn't the one you don't have:

"Okay."

Behind you, without you, a wheel is still spinning somewhere, waiting for you to remember it exists.