Cody Fenwick

The bread comes out of the oven wrong again — a Thursday habit now, three loaves in a row scorched on the bottom because your attention keeps sliding off the proofing timer, off the register, off the scarred eyebrow you keep touching in the steel of the walk-in like it belongs to somebody you're renting from. Forty-four years in this skin, four weeks of it yours, and it is a good body — thick through the shoulders, hands that already know dough without asking you — but the bakery is dead air at 8pm on a Thursday in a town where everyone already has their bread, and you are standing in the back room with flour to your elbows thinking about how none of this is a decision anymore, it is just a thing you do the way some men check scores. You wipe your hands on your apron. You do not clock out. You take out your phone, thumb it open to a wheel you have spun sixteen times before, and you pay for a seventeenth without letting yourself think the word again — again, again, the whole reason you are standing here instead of pulling the next batch.

You spin.

The gym light is fluorescent and flat and comes down on you two inches wider on the bar than you've gripped it all year, and your body — his body, and then in the space of a blink only body, no his about it — is already three reps into a set you didn't start, breath ragged through your teeth on a schedule that isn't yours, weight groaning down the bar's flex on the last rep, the one that's supposed to shake, and it doesn't. Your face does none of what a last rep's face does. You grind it out slow and easy and put the bar back on the rack yourself, and the metal clang of it is the first sound you actually hear as him.

Sweat on your neck, cooling faster than it should — the gym's AC fighting a losing war against a Houston evening — and a water bottle sweating its own ring onto the rubber floor mat by your foot, and when your hand goes to it, unthinking, the plastic gives a flash: him this morning, this same bottle, filling it at a kitchen sink with a window that looks at a chain-link fence and a neighbor's dead lawn, alone, the apartment too quiet the way it's been quiet since March. The name comes with it sideways, not spoken, just there — Eleanor. Not a memory of a person, a memory of the *absence* of one, the particular shape a person leaves in a one-bedroom when she takes her plants and half the towels and none of the explanations.

The shirt is next — gray, damp, clinging — and the collar drags against his chest where the tattoo sits, and touching it is like putting a hand on a hot stove: script letters, a date, 2018, and it isn't Eleanor the ex, it's Eleanor the sister, four years gone now, and this morning — his this morning, sleeve by sleeve, standing in front of a mirror he doesn't really look into anymore — he'd pulled this same shirt over his head without thinking about her at all, which is its own small daily miracle he doesn't examine. The apron memory surfaces behind it unbidden: mornings behind the counter, the mesh guard cold through cotton, the saw's idle hum, trays of ribeye and brisket laid out like a museum of Tuesday, a customer asking is this fresh and him saying it's always fresh, ma'am, in a voice that stopped being a joke to him a long time ago.

His hands know the bar the way the baker's hands knew dough — decades of muscle deciding things before he does — but this body is thirty-three and carries it differently: quicker recovery, a knee that clicks going up stairs and nothing worse, a chest that still, some nights, forgets to breathe right in his sleep and jolts him half-up gasping, alone in a bed built for two that's been built for one since March. The gym is where he puts the version of himself that Eleanor — the girlfriend, the ex, the one who left — used to say she liked best, the version with somewhere to put his hands. He hasn't fully clocked yet that liking it hasn't made it stop hurting.

You feel all of that land in a body that is not tired, not really, not the way the last rep should have left it — and that wrongness is the only thing that's yours in this, the only seam.

You look down. Turn the hand over, his hand, callused where a blade handle sits against it every day of a life you didn't live, the water bottle sweating against your palm now instead of the floor.

You lift your eyes to the mirror across the gym floor, not a lens, just glass, and you hold there like the story told you to.

"One more set," you say, out loud, to nobody, in a voice that isn't asking anyone's permission — his voice, doing exactly what you tell it.