Brett Hollenbeck

The site loads slower than it should, like it's thinking about whether to let you in. It is the middle of the night. Everyone in the house, if there is a house, is asleep. There has been nothing on, there has been doomscrolling, there has been the particular hour where wanting something stupid feels like the only honest thing left to want. You have wanted this for years, quietly, the way people want things they assume are closed to them — the stories, the threads, the question of what it would be to open your eyes and be someone else entirely. vessel.cards. A wheel, rendered in gold, spinning for no reason until you give it one. You pay. You spin. You do not expect anything, which is its own kind of expecting.

It stops.

And you are bent at the waist in full sun, dirt under two short blunt nails, a potato plant gripped stem-down in a hand that is not the hand you do not have, because you have never had one. Heat on the back of a neck that has never been sunburned before. A straw hat brim cutting a hard line across your vision. Your fingers — his fingers — are already closing around the next stem before you catch up to the motion, and something in the sequence goes wrong: you pull sideways instead of up, the plant tears, dirt sprays, and the ten after that come out slow, deliberate, checked like a man counting his own steps down a familiar staircase he has suddenly decided might not be there.

He does not notice. He never will.

But his hands know this job in a way that has nothing to do with thinking, and that knowledge comes up through the touch of things, the only door there is. The stem in your fist gives you a flash — his father's hands over his, nine years old, being shown the trick of the pull, up and not out — then it's gone, replaced by the canvas of the apron against your gut, grey and stiff with dried starch and years, and that gives you a whole season: the ache low in the back that never fully leaves, the way the dad-bod weight sits heavier some mornings than others, the bend that is just a bend now, unremarkable, his body's normal grammar. The bandana at your throat smells like sweat and like the detergent his girlfriend buys in bulk from the place two towns over, and that smell opens a kitchen, early, her hair still down, two kids' lunches lined up on the counter like a small assembly line, him kissing the part in her hair on his way out the door because he always does, because it is Friday and Friday is a day like every other day.

The shirt gives you the most. Sleeve by sleeve, this morning, rolled exactly to this fold because that's where it stops bothering his forearms — a motion his hands do without his eyes, muscle memory going back to some other morning that bleeds into this one and every one before it. Underneath the shirt, the ink at his shoulders, unseen but felt, a weight of old lines he is proud of and doesn't talk about, a unit, a handful of names he carries on his back because carrying them anywhere else got too hard. That comes with no scene, just a pressure, grief gone quiet from use.

His body is thirty-six and heavier through the middle than he'd like and strong anyway, shoulders that have thrown crates for fifteen years, a lower back that complains by three and shuts up by five, a jaw that someone once told him, in a bar, in another year, was the first thing they noticed — the cleft in it, deep enough that razors catch, which is why it's bare right now, freshly shaved, a habit from a childhood where his mother said a clean jaw was the same as a clean collar. Two kids somewhere behind a school's chain-link right now, a few miles and a few decades of this town away. A diner on Main that closed and nobody reopened. One stoplight. Mass on Sundays when he can manage it, which is most of them. A beer on a Friday night if the week earned it.

You straighten up in him, the potato still ridiculous in his fist, and you look down at the hand holding it — his hand, blunt and sun-dark and not yours, never yours — and you turn it over once, like checking it for a flaw that isn't there.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, to no one, to the row, to the crates stacked at the end of it waiting to be filled.

Somewhere it is the middle of the night and somewhere it is Friday noon and neither of those facts matters half as much, right now, as how long you intend to stay inside the gap between them.