Casey Fontenot

Iqbal Rahman's knees ache from the walk to the kitchen and back, and that is reason enough. He is sixty-two minutes old in this body — less, really, forty seconds shy of a full minute — and already he does not want the knees, the loose skin at the throat, the way the bathroom light finds every year of him at once. He had told himself, spinning last time, that he would sit with this one a while. Learn a retired man's slowness. He gets as far as the recliner, and the wanting is already back, ordinary and total as hunger, and he does not fight it. The laptop is still open on the side table from before. The page loads the way it always loads: a wheel, plain as a raffle, and a button that says SPIN under it in a font too calm for what it does. He does not let himself think about the man he is currently wearing giving anyone permission. He clicks.

The exit sign is for Elysian Fields, and it is not his exit, and his hands do not know that yet because they are not entirely his hands anymore. They come off the wheel and go back on lower, wider, a stranger's grip dressed in a stranger's forearms, and the car eats the drift and straightens itself out before anyone behind would have noticed a thing. Dash light green-gold across the knuckles. A ring of keys ticking faintly against the column. Three miles of dark road ahead that were, a second ago, the last three miles of somebody's ordinary Monday, and are now the first three miles of something else wearing his name.

The shirt is what opens first — gray cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and it gives up the morning it was pulled on: Casey standing in a room one board wide, light coming long and yellow through a shotgun house's single file of doors, his girlfriend's coffee smell already moving down the hall ahead of her, the two of them stepping around each other in a kitchen built for one person at a time, the ease of it, no words needed, her hip against the counter and his hand finding the small of her back on the way past like punctuation. He loves her in a way he has stopped noticing, which is its own kind of proof.

The seatbelt across his chest gives him the drive itself, layered, dozens of times over this stretch — twenty-four on, and the tiredness that isn't sleepy so much as scoured, a tiredness with a smell to it, diesel and structure fire and the particular exhaustion of nothing having gone wrong today, which is its own relief. The wheel under his palms gives back the apron of the firehouse, sun flat white on the concrete, the engine's chrome throwing it back double, somebody's radio going in the bay, the guys ragging him for something he can't quite catch — it slides away before it lands, the way dreams do.

His right hand, resting on the shifter, remembers a bar in the Marigny two years back, a woman he was not yet done loving telling him this wasn't working in a voice too calm for what it was doing to him, and the specific ache of driving home after that alone in this exact seat with the windows down in December because he needed the cold on his face more than he needed the heat.

The calf under the rolled jean cuff is warm, and it gives up the tattoo without being asked twice: a buddy's apartment, cheap gun, worse artist, both of them nineteen drinks in and calling it brotherhood, and the flinch every time since when someone in the locker room asks what it's even supposed to be. He still doesn't have a good answer. He has stopped trying to find one.

His own face, when his hand drifts up to touch it — unbidden, an old habit that isn't yours — brings back nothing specific, just the plain fact of it, hazel eyes in a mirror this morning, hairline further back than he'd like, a face he has made peace with the way you make peace with weather.

The body under all of it is twenty-six and solid in a way Iqbal's never was — shoulders that know their own strength without checking, a heart that isn't working for it, legs that have carried turnout gear up four flights without complaint. Nothing hurts. That alone is worth the trip.

You look down at your hands on the wheel — his hands, wide-knuckled, a callus at the base of the trigger finger from something you haven't found the memory for yet — and you turn one over like it might tell you something the shirt hasn't. The turn signal is still ticking for an exit that means nothing to you. You reach over, unhurried, and click it off, and ease back toward the lane that actually goes home.

"Wrong turn," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out easy, like it's always been yours — and underneath that you're already wondering how long before the wheel calls again, and whether it'll be tonight, or years from now, or the next red light.