Brett Hollenbeck

You have been looking at the same dull screen since the morning stopped being interesting. Nothing is on. You have scrolled past everything twice. The threads are old friends: the man who wakes up in his sister's body, the film where a stranger looks out through a father's eyes, the two-in-the-morning posts from people who swear it is real. You have loved this for as long as you can remember. It is a private thing, and it has never once been for sale.

Then the page with the wheel on it. You do not believe it. You pay anyway, and you spin, and the wheel slows and ticks and stops.

The dark comes first, then the blue light on one cheek. The phone is six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll, and then it starts again, faster and steadier than his was. You have no hands of your own, but you have these. You are lying on your side, and the weight of your belly rests on the mattress like a warm sack of grain. You are enormous, long in the shin, and you take up the whole bed.

The sheet under your arm gives you something unasked. He is in a lot, in the heat, with balloons tied to the mirrors, and the balloons knock together in the wind. Under the sheet, the sleeve of the dark T-shirt, soft and washed thin, brings a different memory: his girlfriend's laugh in a kitchen, and a feeling in his chest like a held breath let go. It is his feeling, not yours.

His thumb flicks past everything he had stopped on. The phone's edge is warm. The case has a worn corner where his pinky always sits, and the worn corner opens an afternoon. A man in a short-sleeved checked shirt is shaking his hand over the hood of a truck. He is selling it and doesn't want to sell it, because the man has a kid in the back seat, and he knocks four hundred off without being asked. He thinks of the savings he has built, a little at a time, and it steadies him. The thunderhead was stacking black over the stubble that day. The light had gone yellow. He remembers how the wind smelled before the rain.

You feel the morning he put on the shirt and tie, each sleeve in his own hands. The tie slid through and the lanyard dropped over his head. The belt went to the third hole. There was the coffee, the pouch tucked under his lip, and the keys.

Your knuckles want to crack, so you let them. They pop, one by one, and it feels like his habit and like relief. Your back aches faintly low down. Your legs are long and heavy. His jaw is smooth, freshly shaved. The sides of his head are clipped hard against the long hair on top.

You lift the hand and turn it over. Freckles run down the wrist. The palm is calloused and strange. You look up, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Hi."

Nobody answers. The screen goes dark, and your face is in it. You wonder how long this lasts, whether the wanting comes back tonight, or in four minutes, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.