Caleb Dreyer

Howard Lindahl's jaw is still stubbled from the morning, and I am still standing in his office with his blue eyes on the window, Cook Inlet gone flat and pewter below. Fifty-two years of knees. Six-three of man who has to duck under things. The screens show green. They have shown green all morning, and I have sat in that green for what feels like a month, though it was less than a minute of his life that I wore him. I pressed the phone's glass with his thumb. I do not say why. The coffee on his desk has a skin on it. He would have drunk it anyway.

Spin.

Heat comes first, on the face, a dry glare from the lamps overhead. Then weight: the basket handle in my right hand, green plastic grip, the wire hanging heavy with fries and dripping into the oil. My arm is light. All of me is light, narrow, a rail of a body, the shoulders sloped, the wrists thin. The motion was already underway and I finish it wrong, jerking the basket too high, so I stop and lower it, and lift it again slowly, the right way, hooking it on the bar to drain. Then the next batch. Then another. I check each one. Something in me checks, though this job has not needed checking in years.

The visor presses a line across his forehead. The headset hums a faint tick in the left ear, a voice somewhere saying a number, two numbers. The grip under my palm has a worn groove, and the groove gives me him: a first week, a manager named Teresa showing him how the oil wants to be respected, his own fear of it, a pink burn across a knuckle that healed to nothing. He was proud when it stopped scaring him. That pride arrives in my chest uninvited, small and warm.

The polo clings at my back with fryer damp. It gives me the morning: him in a kitchen on a street of brick houses, ironing nothing, just flattening the collar with his palm because she said it looked nice on him. Her name comes up through the fabric, Jenna, her text still lit on his phone, a heart and a bad joke about his visor. He pulled the sleeves down over his wrists, one then the other, and the gray cargo pants, the belt notched at its tightest. He ate two toaster pastries standing up. He was nineteen and happy in a plain way I have not been in a thousand bodies.

My teeth find my thumbnail before I know it. The edge is already ragged, bitten to the quick. It tastes of salt and oil. His mouth did that for years, and now it is mine, and I let it.

The floor is tile under thin soles, a little tacky, and the ache in the arches is real, four hours of standing. Past the window, a wide gray street, brick houses with white porches, a low sky pressed on their chimneys. I know none of it and all of it, as a thing he loved without noticing.

I look at my hands. Narrow, quick, pink at the fingertips from the heat, the nails chewed down. I turn them over. Then I look up, past the window, past the steam, into nothing at all.

"Okay," I say, in his light voice. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."