Casey Miller

The headset is still on the desk where you left it, coiled like it's waiting for someone dumber to put it back on. You are Colin Yarnall, twenty years old, and you have been Colin Yarnall for six minutes, and that is exactly long enough to know everything wrong with him: the weak wrists, the voice that cracks when he means to sound sure, the apartment that smells like a candle he bought to cover the smell of not cleaning. Anchorage is dark outside the window at an hour that should be evening and isn't really, the sun already long gone the way it goes in October, and somewhere down the hall a roommate is watching something with a laugh track. You did not choose Colin. Colin is just where the wheel put you last, and six minutes was time enough to hate the fit of him — the ordinary boring smallness of a life that has never once been interesting to be inside. Your thumb is already on the trackpad, the site loading before you've finished deciding, because you never really decide, you just get tired and the getting-tired looks like a decision from outside. The wheel spins its lazy neon circle. You do not wait for it to stop mattering.

It lands, and Colin's kitchen is gone.

There is a cold brass shape in your right hand and your whole arm knows what to do with it before you do — turn, half turn, listen for the give. Fluorescent light overhead, humming at a pitch that has been humming that exact pitch for years. Cinderblock painted the color of nothing, close on one side. Bars on the other, and beyond them a smell of concrete and someone else's sleep. Your hand — his hand — has already caught the mistake: the key was turning the wrong way half a second ago, and now it isn't, now it's slow and correct and checked, the way you check a lock you have checked ten thousand times and don't need to but do anyway because tonight, for one instant, your body forgot and remembered in the same breath. Nobody saw it happen. Nobody was awake to see it.

The keys are warm from a hand that has held them for years, and that's where he comes in — not all at once, but climbed up through the metal like heat.

Casey Miller. Twenty-seven years in this name, most of them spent not thinking about it, the rest spent picking at the skin around his thumbnail on nights like this one, three a.m. rounds, the block quiet except for someone's radio dream-muttering behind a door down the row. The keyring gives you the ring itself first — the exact five keys, the worn brass one third from the top that sticks if you don't lift while you turn — and then it gives you the whole drawer at home where a spare set lives next to a phone charger and a receipt from a diner he means to go back to. The belt against your hip is heavier than Colin's whole existence, radio and cuffs and the little leather pouch he refuses to think hard about, and it gives you a locker room, the particular ammonia smell of a shift change, a coworker named Dale who tells the same joke every Tuesday and Casey still laughs, actually laughs, because it costs nothing and Dale needs it to land somewhere.

The shirt against your back — his back, five-eight, average through the shoulders, a small stubborn softness at the stomach that no amount of walking a cell block wears off — gives you this morning, except it wasn't morning, it was the evening before, the sun still up enough to lay orange across his bedroom floor while Nashville got ready to go loud two blocks over. Buttoning up, top down, the second button always a little tight, a habit of tucking the left side first because the right always rides up if you don't. His fingers know this shirt. They have known it through four Christmases alone, a girlfriend two years back who left not dramatically, just quietly, the way a plant dies from being almost but not quite watered enough — no one who still matters, and that's true, she doesn't, not the way this floor matters, not the way the batch of keys in your palm matters.

The nose comes to you last and strangest — a memory of pain that isn't there anymore, a bar fight nobody remembers the reason for, nineteen years old and too proud to get it properly reset, and now you feel it exactly the way he feels it: not pain, just a faint permanent list to the day, the world coming in a half-degree crooked and unremarkable, the way it has for eight years.

You feel the floor through the soles of boots that have walked this exact stretch of corridor so many times his legs have stopped asking his brain for permission. You feel how alone he is in it — not lonely exactly, just solitary in a specific American way, comfortable enough on paper, no faith to lean into, no drink to soften the hours, nothing in his mouth but his own name said back to him by inmates who call him Miller like it's a weather report. He never planned on this job. He fell into it the way you fall into most things at twenty-two with a general ed degree and a need to make rent, and somewhere in the falling he got good at it, good at standing very still in bad light and being the reason nothing happens.

Your hand is on the lock. His hand. It isn't shaking. You look down at it anyway — at the crooked knuckle, the ragged cuticle he's been worrying at since he was a teenager, the small honest calluses of a life spent turning keys — and something in you that is not him and never will be looks up into the reflection thrown back faint and warped off the window glass, neon bleeding red and blue through the wire mesh behind you from the alley outside.

"Six minutes," you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't cracking at all now, "was way too long to be that kid."