Cody Duplessis

The screen is the only light in the room, and it has been for an hour. Nothing on, nothing worth finishing, the kind of Monday that doesn't ask anything of you and gets nothing back. You've had this particular hunger for as long as you can remember naming things — the itch of *what would it be to be someone else, entirely, no metaphor* — fed for years on movies and forum threads and half-finished stories where the trick never actually happens, it just gets described happening to somebody else. And then a link, and then a page that shouldn't be real: a wheel, plain as a raffle, vessel.cards in a font that doesn't try hard to convince you of anything. You pay. You don't believe it. You spin anyway, because not spinning was never actually on the table.

The wheel stops.

You are leaning on a rail that is wet and warm at once, steam coming up off a valve under a glove that is not your glove, on a hand that is not your hand — thick-knuckled, callused hard across the palm, a hand that has done this exact motion so many times it stopped needing a mind behind it. Except for half a second it does need one, because you're new in there and you turn the valve wrong, some wrong quarter-notch, and the body — his body — catches it before you do, some leftover reflex still idling, and does it again slow and correct. Then again. And again, ten times checked on a job that hasn't needed checking in years, while lights on a derrick you can't see the top of climb up into a sky the color of a bruise healing.

Steam. Diesel. Salt coming off water somewhere close. The gloves are the first thing that talk to you — stiff, sweat-cured, and behind them, arriving like something surfacing out of dark water: a hand on a wrench at fourteen years old, an uncle's voice saying *feel for it, don't look for it,* and the particular pride of a boy who was heavy and slow at school sports finding out his hands were fast at something that mattered more. Cody. The name comes with the memory, not before it, the way his mother says it, two syllables flattened out by a Ninth Ward accent she never lost.

The coveralls are next — navy canvas gone soft and grey at the knees, and touching them is touching this morning: a room one wall wide, light through a window with a slaver's-brick view of the street two feet away, steam already rising off the pavement outside before nine, sun cutting through it. Getting dressed slow because the shift starts at some hour that isn't day or night anymore, just *shift*, and this is a hitch he's four days into and eleven days from finished. Zipping the coveralls up over a body that carries its weight low and solid, a body that gets called *big man* affectionately by men twice his age who like him fine, who don't razz him about the gap in his teeth anymore because he stopped minding it around nineteen and once he stopped minding it, so did everyone else.

The hard hat, orange, sweat-salted at the band — under it, a whole year comes back at once, dense and warm: hitches offshore and hitches on this barge-rig sitting practically in the river's lap, homesick in a way he can't explain because home is four miles away and he still can't get to it. A girlfriend's name arriving with the smell of her apartment, the specific tiredness of loving someone on a schedule that never matches hers, a phone call cut short by a horn. He doesn't drink — never wanted to, watched it do things to men on this deck he didn't want done to him — but there's the vape in his coverall pocket, and touching that pocket gives you the taste of it, cheap mint, three a day, a habit he swears he'll quit once the hitch is over and never does.

His back aches low, both sides, a permanent low hum from lifting things built for machines and not men. His hands know forty valves like this one without looking. He believes, distantly and without a church to put it in, that something is out there arranging things, though he couldn't tell you what and has never tried. None of it is anything he'd bring up. It's just what's under his hands when the hands are his.

You look down at them — his, yours, the gloves stripped back by nothing, just noticed, thick fingers, a scrape healing under the nail of the thumb. Steam still lifting off the pipe in front of you. Somewhere behind you, out past the rail, the shotgun houses of a street he could walk to in ten minutes sit lit up gold in a sun that shouldn't be up this late into a night shift, and isn't, not for him — this is his morning, his always was.

"There you are," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out lower than you expected, and you don't know yet if that's for one shift or forty years.