Bryan Hutsell

You are Gregory Tomaszewski for one more minute, standing in his kitchen with his gray hair and his hazel eyes and his dimples that show up whether he wants them or not, and it is evening in Philadelphia, and you have already decided. You spent the day in him the way you'd wear a coat that fits but isn't yours — the silver in the mirror, the beard trimmed by somebody else's hand, the ache in a knee that was never your knee. It isn't boredom exactly. It's that Gregory woke up this morning already between jobs, already forty-one, already tired in a way that had nothing to do with you, and by four o'clock you understood you'd spent good money to go on being tired in a new body. You want a floor under your feet you didn't inherit secondhand. You open the laptop, you find the page with the wheel on it, vessel.cards, and you don't hesitate over the click the way you did the first nine or ten times. Your thumb — his thumb — taps to spin.

The television cuts from a dim living room to a burst of white light and you are sitting up straight before you know you're a "you" again, spine snapping straight against couch cushions, a remote set down on the arm of a couch by a hand that is not the hand you had six seconds ago. Shorter fingers. A cleft in the chin you can't see but can feel, a small hard dent under your own beard. Skinny-fat weight settling wrong across a stomach that has never done a sit-up in its life. Barefoot. The room is going blue-dark outside a window, early evening here, the last light dying behind saguaro shapes you can't see yet but that press in at the edge of what this body knows. The show plays on. You do not laugh at the part that made him laugh an hour ago.

The couch fabric is rough under your palms and that's the first door: a Tuesday, no, a hundred Tuesdays, this exact cushion gone soft in the middle from years of one man's weight, kids climbing over the arm of it, a woman's laugh from the kitchen doorway calling something about dinner. The remote in your hand is warm from his palm and it gives you an argument, months old, about the cable bill, his voice going quiet instead of loud because that's how he fights. Three kids — you feel them before you see faces, a weight distributed through the house like separate rooms of heat, small shoes at the door, a crayon drawing taped to the fridge you have not walked into yet but already know is there. Bryan Hutsell. The name arrives with the shirt against your back, gray-green cotton gone thin at the collar, and dressing this morning comes back sleeve by sleeve — pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the shade still down, Melissa already up with the baby, him telling himself today's the day he finally hears back from the warehouse on Van Buren, knowing already, in the pit of the stomach this body still owns, that he probably won't.

The sweatpants at his knees carry a different day entire: gray hoodie, joggers, Converse gone soft-soled from years, a coffee cup in one hand and the phone in the other, him walking out of a gas station on a morning that felt, for once, like it might turn into something — an interview, a callback, a maybe. Nothing came of that one either. His hands know things without being told: how to change a fitted sheet one-handed with a baby balanced on a hip, how to check a job posting three times before deciding it isn't worth the gas money to drive to, how to bow his head at Mass on Sunday beside three restless kids and mean the prayer anyway, quietly, without telling anyone what for. He has never had a drink in his life and never wanted one; some appetite in him just never showed up, the way the beard grew in but the taste for whiskey never did. The chin under all this beard is the thing anyone would notice first if they weren't already looking at his eyes — a hard cleft groove, older than him, older than the yard outside full of gravel and one crooked saguaro shadow going long in the dying light. His knees ache faintly in that skinny-fat way, strength gone soft with sitting, muscle memory of manual labor five years old and fading. Somewhere behind a door down the hall a kid is asking Melissa when Dad's coming to say goodnight, and the sound of it lands in a chest that isn't panicking, isn't grieving — it just doesn't know yet that it should.

You look down. The hand that comes up in front of your face is broader than Gregory's, younger, a callus gone soft at the base of the thumb, no ring though you can feel where a ring should someday go, a life half-built and going nowhere fast, propped up on a rented couch in a rented dark. You turn it over once, like checking if it's really attached.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the empty room, to the television still playing without you in on the joke — and you don't know yet if that's true for a day or for a year, only that you are here now, wearing a stranger's ache and a stranger's chin, and the wheel is still sitting open on a laptop forty minutes and one whole life away.