Cody Baranski

The knife has been sitting on the cutting board for eleven minutes and you have been standing over it in Nabil's shop apron, not cutting anything, because tomorrow is Nabil's daughter's birthday and Nabil's wife wants you home early and none of that is yours to want. Fluorescent light. The smell of cold meat. Forty-four years old, five-six, a belly that never left after the divorce he doesn't have and the marriage he does, hazel eyes tired in a way that isn't about sleep. You have worn him for less than a minute and already the apartment upstairs from the shop is pressing on you like a debt — his brother's wedding next month, the ache in his once-broken nose when the walk-in gets too cold, a life stacked with obligations that are real and patient and his. Not yours. Never yours. You take off the apron without hanging it up, because whoever's in him after you can hang it up, and you walk to the back room where the laptop is already open to vessel.cards, wheel spinning lazy and blue on the screen like it's been waiting for you specifically, and it has. You spin because five hundred and nine is a nicer number than five hundred and eight, and because Nabil's hands are good with a blade but bad with everything else, and because the wanting never actually goes away, it just goes quiet for a night. That's the whole reason. You don't say it out loud even to yourself.

The television cuts to a bright frame — some cop show hitting a commercial — and in that half-second of white light you are sitting up straight on a couch you've never sat on, in a body that outweighs Nabil's by a hundred pounds easy, a remote coming to rest on the couch arm under a hand that is not doing what you told it to do. It did that on its own, before you were fully here. The room is dark except the TV glow and something moving blue-grey across a face you can't see yet because you're behind it. Cans on the coffee table. A smell of stale carpet and something faintly sweet, chemical — glucose tabs, open on the end table.

The first thing that comes is the shirt — not this shirt, the couch pants, the hoodie, soft and worn thin at the elbows, and through it: a Tuesday, him pulling it over his head one-handed while the other hand checked stream chat on his phone, laughing at something someone typed, going live in four minutes, going live in three. The headphones are around his neck even now, cold plastic against his collarbone, and touching them gives you a whole desk: RGB light crawling red to purple to blue across a wall of monitors, a webcam with a ring light, three thousand people watching him not-quite-lose at a game he's actually good at, chat spamming his name — CodyB, CodyBTV — faster than he can read it. The mic. The smell of energy drink gone flat. A year of nights exactly like that one, alone in a room made bright on purpose so the rest of the house could stay dark.

The couch under you gives you more — this couch, this exact dent worn into the cushion shaped like him, and a wedding band on the left hand, plain gold, and through the ring: her. Standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed, not really mad, just tired of the same argument about the stream schedule, about money that's fine but never quite enough, about whether he was going to see the doctor about his sugar or wait until something actually happened. She's asleep upstairs right now, this exact minute, alone in the bed because he told her he'd be up in a while and meant it and then didn't move. There's an ex somewhere further back, opened by nothing in the room, just there anyway the way exes are — a girl from before Ohio got small, before the diagnosis, before the dip can that's sitting on the end table giving you the taste of it, wintergreen gone bitter at the back of a jaw that clenches on its own, has always clenched on its own, a habit older than the wife, older than the scar.

The scar you find last, because you're not looking for it, your hand goes to your own neck without being asked and there it is — raised, shiny in patches, running from under the jaw down into the collar, and it comes with heat, real heat, a bonfire seven years back, a dare, a coat that caught, three seconds that made a friend group go silent for a year afterward and made him the guy with the story nobody brings up. He doesn't touch it much anymore. It just lives there. You feel it living there.

Six feet of him, heavy through the shoulders and the gut both, feet planted wide on a rug gone flat from years of the same two feet standing on it. The body aches in the ordinary way — knees that carry too much, a low hum behind the eyes that is just the sugar doing what the sugar does, unfilled prescription somewhere in a kitchen drawer. His hands know a mouse and a keyboard the way Nabil's hands knew a blade, muscle memory with nowhere else to go tonight because the stream ended two hours ago and this — dark room, dead show, a wife asleep upstairs he told he'd follow to bed — this is the part nobody subscribes to watch.

You look down at the hand still holding the remote and turn it over, thick fingers, gold band catching the last blue light off the screen, and you lift your eyes into the dark like there's a camera there even though there isn't, not tonight, not right now.

"Didn't think that one was gonna take," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's true.