Brett Hollenbeck

It is the middle of the morning where you are, a Tuesday, nothing in particular on the agenda, and you have been scrolling the way you always scroll, through the thing you have never told anyone about — the swap stories, the "what if you woke up in someone else," the forums at two a.m. that you called research and were really just wanting. You find the wheel site by the kind of accident that doesn't feel like one. Vessel.cards. A page, plain as a receipt, with a wheel on it and a price under the wheel. You have spun slot machines that took themselves more seriously. You pay. You spin. You do not expect anything, which is its own kind of lie, because you have wanted this exact thing for years and never once believed the bill would come due.

It comes due.

There is no room, no falling, no door between one life and the next — there is only a thumb, not yours, moving across a phone screen faster than it was moving a second ago, and a weight under you that is not a shape you have ever worn, low and dense and warm, and a dark that smells like someone else's pillow. Monday evening in a trailer outside a town you couldn't name if you tried, blue phone-light lying flat across a jaw that has just finished shaving — you can feel that, somehow, the smoothness of it, a cheek with nothing on it, no drag. His thumb keeps moving. You let it. You are not driving yet so much as riding along behind his own stopped blink, and then the blink doesn't come back the way it should, and that's you, that's the seam, that's the whole transaction closing.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Thermal, long-sleeved, soft from a hundred washes, and the second your attention — his attention, now yours to borrow — lands on the fabric at the shoulder, something comes up out of it like heat off blacktop: a locker room smell, bleach and fry oil, an apron crusted dark and heavy around his neck, the particular ache of standing twelve hours at a sprayer wand with water finding its way past the glove cuff every single shift no matter what he does. Brett. The name arrives with the ache, stitched to it. Brett Hollenbeck, thirty-two, and his hands — your hands now — already know things without being told: how to flip a rack one-handed, how to read a water stain like weather, how to brace a hose against a hip so it doesn't buck.

The ring is the second thing. Plain gold band, left hand, worn soft at the inside curve from being put on and taken off ten thousand times for dish duty, and it opens wider than the shirt did — a whole kitchen of a marriage. Shayna. Her name comes with the smell of her shampoo in a bathroom too small for two people and a decision, once, young, to get sealed in the temple in Vegas because that's where her family was, and a daughter now five years old who calls him Daddy-bear because he is built like one. There was another woman first, Christine, years before Shayna, the one who left for Reno and a better job and still texts him on his birthday, and he answers every time and never tells Shayna the whole of what that costs him to do, which isn't much, but isn't nothing either. That's the thing nobody knows: not an affair, nothing so clean as that — just a drawer he keeps shut, a name he still flinches toward.

The tattoo on his forearm gives you the morning it was finished: a portrait, black-and-gray, a face he sat still for six hours to get right, his father's face, dead four years now of something in the lungs that the mine gave him before the church ever got a chance to save him from anything. Brett doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, never did, and some of that is doctrine and some of it is watching his dad cough for a decade and deciding young which kind of man he'd rather be.

The clothes this morning — no, this evening, his evening — come back last and smallest: pulling the thermal over his head after his shift shower at the restaurant because the trailer's water heater is temperamental and he'd rather do it at work, tucking his garments under it without thinking, the automatic reverence of a body that has dressed this way ten thousand mornings and will not stop noticing it, even now, even half-asleep, even with a stranger standing where he used to stand alone.

You feel all of it land in a body that is shorter than you expected to imagine, five-four, dense through the chest and gut, strong in a way that has nothing to do with vanity — the strength of a man who has muscled hundred-pound racks for a decade and calls it Tuesday. His jaw, freshly shaved, is smooth under the glow of the phone. The dimples are there even now, even slack, carved in by a decade of a smile he gives away for free.

You stop the thumb. You set the phone down on the quilt, face up, the room losing its only light to black for a second before your eyes adjust, and you lift both his hands in front of his own face and turn them over slowly, knuckle-nicked, dish-soft, ring catching what little light is left.

"Hey," you say, to no one, in his voice, dimples showing even though nothing in you is smiling yet. "Didn't think that'd actually work."