Casey Vellum

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The foreman's leg aches where it isn't there anymore, that phantom throb below the socket, and you have had this body less than a minute and already you know you're done with it. It's not the leg. Marlon Whitfield's hands are big and capable and there's a foreman's clipboard on the folding chair beside you, a crew waiting on him tomorrow at six, a whole life stacked up neat as lumber — and none of it is yours, none of it ever gets to be yours, that's the whole point of the wheel and you knew that going in the last eight hundred and forty-one times. But tonight, sitting in his office chair with the overhead light buzzing, something in you is already restless, already bored of the ache and the weight and the particular tiredness of a body that worked concrete since seven a.m. You want something without mileage on it yet. You want to be new somewhere new.

You open the site on his phone, thumb clumsy with a stranger's print, and you spin.

—

The lamp is the last thing you see with his eyes before it isn't his anymore. Warm brass light on a shriveled paw, four cardboard fingers curling like a dead thing dreaming, and his mouth is open on a word he doesn't get to finish. Then it's yours. One shrunken finger draws in against the wood grain of the table. Then another. You feel the sentence die behind his teeth, feel his shoulders — narrower than Marlon's, tighter — come down out of a hunch you didn't put there. You are standing at a card table in a room that smells like dust and pipe grease under a desk lamp's small yellow sun, and outside the window Detroit is a blue smear going dark over brick rooftops.

You turn the paw over in the light like you already know what it's for, though you don't, not yet — that's him, that's a hand's-worth of memory arriving before the rest of him does.

—

The shirt is what starts it. Chambray, worn soft as cloth gets after four years of the same three shirts on rotation, and touching it — no, wearing it, being in it — opens the morning it went on him. Casey Vellum standing in a narrow bedroom in a two-flat off Vernor, sun through a blind that never sits right, pulling this exact shirt over his head while Danielle's alarm goes off in the other room and he yells at her to hit snooze, we got time. The sleeve catches on his tattoo going down, the eagle and the dagger inked into the meat of his upper arm two summers back in a shop on Michigan Ave that smelled like green soap, bold lines already softening at the edges the way American traditional does, like it's built to fade honest.

His hands remember the wrench before you do. Muscle laid down over years of kneeling on bathroom tile, of reaching up blind into a wall cavity to find a shutoff valve by feel alone, of the particular ache that lives in his knees now at twenty-four already, a plumber's knees, older than the rest of him. There's a callus at the base of his right thumb from the pipe wrench's handle and it throbs faintly with old familiar use, comfortable, like a dog curled in its usual spot.

The card table gives you Thursdays — this Thursday, every Thursday, him and his buddy Renner from two houses down playing pinochle badly and drinking two beers each because that's the ceiling, Casey's never been much of a drinker, a few times a year at most, family occasions, somebody's wedding. The monkey's paw came from Renner's uncle's estate sale, a joke gift, and they'd been making stupid wishes on it all evening — wish for the Wings to make the playoffs, wish for the Lions O-line to hold for once — and Casey had opened his mouth for one more when the lamp light did something the light isn't supposed to do.

Under his bare feet, the rug — Danielle's rug, from the apartment they're building toward sharing, half her things already migrated into his half of this place — gives you her, gives you three years of her, gives you a Tuesday in February when she brought him soup because his back was wrecked from a crawlspace job and she didn't say anything about it being romantic, just handed him the bowl and turned on the Wings game and let him lean against her on the couch. Gives you the fact that he loves her uncomplicatedly, the way you love something you have not yet had reason to doubt. Gives you, distantly, softer, a boy he dated at nineteen before her, no weight to that memory now, no ache, just fact.

The vape in his back pocket, half-forgotten, gives you nothing but the taste of it, mint going stale, an evening habit and not a real one.

You feel how young the body is under all this — twenty-four in the knees that already complain, twenty-four in the smooth unstubbled jaw, twenty-four in the fringe cut blunt and straight across his forehead the way his mother's cut it for him as a kid and he never saw a reason to grow out of it. Average build, unremarkable, a body that does its work and doesn't announce itself, and you like that about it already, the way you like the quiet of a house before you've decided what to break in it.

Somewhere above Detroit it is the same second it is in New York, hours apart on the clock and no distance at all in the taking, and Casey Vellum's mouth had been open on a wish nobody will remember him making.

—

You look down at your hand — his hand, the one holding the paw, trigger finger for a wrench, ring finger bare because he hasn't asked her yet, though the shirt already told you he's thinking about it — and you turn it slowly under the desk lamp the way he turned the paw, like it's a tool you're only now getting the feel of.

Then you lift your eyes to the window, to the dark coming down over the brick street, and you say, quiet, testing the voice like it's new hardware:

"Guess I got my wish."