Caleb Rasmussen

You are standing in a dead man's kitchen in Pittsburgh, in the middle of the night, with the refrigerator humming and Sione Fuimaono's wife's reading glasses folded on the counter where she left them. They are not hers. She is not his wife. She is a woman who came with him, in the way everything comes with a body and none of it is yours.

He has been you for less than a minute. Fifty-four years of back, a belly that sits warm and heavy over the belt, black hair, a security guard's flat feet aching inside socks. You stood in this kitchen and found the pills in the cabinet and knew what they were for, and found the photograph on the refrigerator of a girl in a cap and gown, and knew she was his, and felt it land in your chest like a hand. It was too much. It was a whole life pressed on you at once, a grief you had not paid for, and you wanted something with no one waiting in it. Something light and young and unattended. So you do not wait for morning. You open the page with the wheel on it. vessel.cards. You pay. Sione's thumb is steady on the glass, and you are sorry about that, a little, and you spin.

Then there is a cold floor under bare feet.

There is a bathroom, dark, and a small hard light under your chin, a phone held in a hand that is not yours, and a face in the glass looking back with its mouth still shaped around a number. Sixty-two. You were saying it. The voice in your throat is higher than Sione's, and lighter. The air smells of mint and wet towel. Rain ticks at the window.

The first thing to come is the edge of the sink under your left palm, cool porcelain, a chip in the lip that your thumb finds without being asked. A flash: him at nine years old, standing on a stool at this kind of sink while a woman's voice told him to brush for the whole song. The shame of a lie about it. Then gone.

The phone is warm. Your thumb knows the case, rubbery, cracked at one corner. Through it comes a night, not this one: a message he was not meant to read, a name he had trusted, and a long minute of sitting on the stairs afterward. You do not get the words. You get the stomach dropping, the careful way he breathed through it, and a prayer he started and did not finish. It was a Sunday hymn his mouth knew before his mind did. He has wanted for hours to look at himself and see whether anything showed.

The T-shirt is soft from washing, thin at the collar. Where it hangs across your shoulders, the morning comes up, not this morning but the one before the shift: his arms through the sleeves, the black one because it hides the sweat, then the green-and-blue vest from the hook by the door, zipper snagging, the pricing gun in the pocket with its little lanyard. The aisle of electronics. Straightening boxes until their edges lined up, a small private order he loved. A customer who called him sir and meant it. Sixty-one dollars of tips jar money at the coffee shop on the corner, and the barista's name he could never remember, and how that bothered him.

The pajama pants are loose around your long legs. Six feet of him, and it is all easy, loose, a runner's frame, thighs that do not ache, knees that do not announce the stairs. There is no tobacco in the lungs, no drink in the blood, nothing ruined yet. You breathe in all the way and the ribs open without complaint. Your jaw is smooth under the light, shaved clean that afternoon, and the cheeks beneath your eyes are dusted with freckles. In each earlobe a tiny stud is cold against the skin.

Last, the mirror. You lean in. He leaned the same way a minute ago, hunting for what the world could see, and found nothing. Behind his eyes is only quiet now, no one left to grieve, and his grief has come across with the body like a coat that still has his shape in it. You feel it and do not shed it. It's yours until you spin again.

You lift the phone away from your chin. The beam drops to your hands, and you turn them over under it, fingers long, nails clean, a faint scrape across one knuckle. They are strangers' hands. They are yours. You look up into the glass, into a face that has not yet learned how to hold you.

"Sixty-three," you say, quietly, and wonder how long you get.