Brody Kaminski

The site loads slow on a Sunday that has nothing in it. You have had this evening a hundred times before — the scroll, the low hum of a night with no shape — but never with a wheel at the bottom of it. You have wanted this specific thing for years, quietly, the way some people want a house or a marriage: to wake up as someone else, to feel a stranger's weight settle around you like a coat that fits wrong in all the right ways. You did not think it would work. You pay anyway. You spin anyway. The wheel does what wheels do, and then it isn't spinning anymore, and there isn't a you to watch it stop.

There is a bed. There is a shirt against a back that is not shaped like anything you have ever called your own — broad, soft-hard, warm from sleep it wasn't fully having. There is a phone six inches from a face, thumb stalled mid-scroll on something that doesn't matter anymore because the thumb starts moving again, faster now, steadier, flicking through with a rhythm that isn't his. The room is dark except for the blue rectangle. Somewhere outside this room the sky is doing the pale nothing-color of early Sunday morning, though the body under you doesn't know that yet, doesn't know anything yet, because there's no one left in it to know.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Gray, thin at the collar, worn soft — and it gives you a Tuesday, unprompted: pulling it over his head after a shower, the mirror fogged, humming something with no name to it because the meds had kicked in right that morning and the world had that unclenched quality it only gets a few days a month. Brody Kaminski. The name arrives the way names arrive in dreams, already known. Eighteen. A dorm two years from now that hasn't happened yet in this memory, still a bedroom in a house on a Pittsburgh street with public stairs cut into the yard behind it, wet leaves gone slick and black on the concrete every fall since he was small enough to slip on them.

The mattress under this body's hip is thin, a twin XL that doesn't quite fit him, and it gives you the year he stopped growing — sixteen, the growth spurt that widened his shoulders and never gave him the height to go with it, so he ended up built like something meant to hold weight rather than move fast. Football, two seasons, until his knees complained more than the payoff was worth. The tattoo at his collarbone — geometric, fine-lined, a design he picked off a wall in twenty minutes and has never regretted — comes back with the tattoo artist's hands, the specific sting of it, the way he'd told himself he'd get a second one and never had.

The phone in his hand gives you the least of it, oddly — just tiredness, a scroll that had stopped meaning anything an hour ago, the particular flat 2 a.m. feeling of a mind that won't quiet down even on the good nights, the pill bottle on the desk three feet away that he is careful, always, to take on schedule, because he knows what happens when he isn't. There's a girl in some of the scrolling, not a girlfriend, never quite, a few matches that went nowhere and didn't wound him much. There's a laptop somewhere in this life too, propped open on a lawn gone green in a memory that smells like cut grass and early-semester nerves, an ordinary Tuesday among a hundred ordinary Tuesdays, a kid who is fine, who is mostly fine, who smokes when he drinks and drinks four times a year and calls that moderation.

None of it weighs anything. That's the strange mercy of him — nothing chasing him hard enough to be a wound, just a low hum under everything, managed, medicated, survivable. You didn't expect a stranger to feel this ordinary from the inside. You didn't expect to like it.

The thumb stops. The scroll dies mid-motion, his hand still holding the shape of it.

You lift the hand off the phone and look at it — blunt fingers, a faint white scar along one knuckle that isn't yours to have earned, blond hair on the forearm catching the phone's cooling light. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, and it is, it's heavier and wider than anything you've ever called a hand before, and it is yours now the way nothing has ever been yours before this.

You look up, into the dark, toward wherever a camera would be if there were one.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, testing the shape of it in your mouth. "Okay — hi."

You don't know for how long. You don't know when the wanting comes back, when some other Sunday finds you at a screen again with the wheel loaded and waiting. For now there's just this bed, this dark, this borrowed breath going in and out like it's always belonged to you.