Cody Hutnik

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Marcus Whittier's hands ache before noon most days, and today is no different — the deep bone-tired ache of fifty-five years of picking boxes off shelves for other men's warehouses, and you have been him for less than a minute when the ache reminds you why you came back. It is Monday, early afternoon in Atlanta, the break room smell of burnt coffee and cardboard, the vitiligo patches on his forearms pale under the fluorescents, and you stand there in him feeling how little of the day is left in his knees. You only just took this body. You already know you don't want to spend the rest of your life inside it. There's a particular boredom in a body that has stopped surprising you, one spin in, and it's not his fault — a decent enough man, gray-haired, steady — but you paid for the wheel to feel something arrive, not to feel yourself settle. So you find a corner, get out the phone with hands that aren't used to being asked to do this twice in one lifetime, and you spin again before the coffee's cold.

The door of vessel.cards doesn't creak. It just gives you somewhere else.

You are bent slightly at the hip, weight cocked into a cardboard box, and the box comes down onto bare floorboards with a sound that echoes because the room is empty and has good bones. Midday light, west-facing, comes low through a window with no curtains yet. Keys hang from the front door, still in the lock, swaying a little from the last hand that touched them — your hand, a second ago, except it wasn't. Your knees don't ache. They're twenty years younger and they've never ached in their life. Denver: you register the mountains through the window before you register the man. He is not asleep and not eating lunch — he is standing in the exact middle of moving in, in the exact middle of a Monday, and something about a body this young holding still this easily is its own small shock after Marcus.

You set the box down slow, the way he would, though you don't know that yet — you're only imitating the last half-second of him. Then his hand goes to the door and he doesn't lock it, doesn't shut it. Leaves the keys hanging. And instead you walk the wall, knuckles trailing the drywall, corner to corner, like counting a room in the dark before the lights are on, and the memories start coming up through your own fingers as if the paint itself remembered him.

The wall gives you a flash first: him at nine, running his hand along a fence like this on the way to school, some old habit of touching things to know they're real. Then the shirt — the collar of it against his throat gives you a whole morning, sleeve by sleeve: he'd pulled it on today in a half-packed apartment across town, buttoned it with the cuffs already rolled because he never buttons cuffs, thought about Danielle asleep still in the old bed they were taking apart tomorrow, thought I should text her when I get there and then didn't, because his hands were full and stayed full for six hours after that.

The tattoo at his collarbone burns faint under your own touch when your fingers brush it without meaning to — script, a name, a date. Steven. His father. Four years dead of something the family still doesn't say out loud at dinner, and Cody had it inked eight months after, in a shop two blocks from the shop he works in now, gritting through it because needles near the throat are worse than anyone tells you. He remembers — you remember, wearing him — the particular ache of the outline pass more than the shading.

The earring is nothing, a fifty-dollar decision made on a dare at nineteen that turned out to suit him, and it gives you almost nothing back except a laugh in someone else's kitchen, and you let it go.

The floor under his boots gives you the shop: the counter of trays, the saw's whine cutting off mid-morning for a break, sawdust and sanitizer, the particular give of a bone under a blade when you've done it ten thousand times and your hands know the joint better than your eyes do. He is good at this. He likes being good at it, likes the trays lined up at closing, likes that his forearms got this thick from doing it every day since he was seventeen and lying about his age to get hired. He does not love the smell that follows him home no matter how he showers. He has learned to stop noticing it.

And under all of it, quieter, the asthma — a tightness that isn't happening right now but that his body remembers as a possibility, a rescue inhaler in a jacket pocket somewhere in one of these boxes, a summer at eleven when he couldn't finish a soccer game and had to watch from the sideline furious and embarrassed, an old shame that's mostly worn smooth by now.

The girlfriend comes up last, softest: Danielle, the shape of an argument about paint colors for this exact room, the shape of her laugh when he does an impression of his coworker, the shape of wanting this apartment to be theirs eventually and not saying so yet because it's only week one. You feel that want sitting in his chest like a low coal, unclaimed, patient. It isn't yours. You feel it anyway.

You reach the far corner. The room is his now, checked, known, four walls confirmed solid. You stop walking.

You look down at his hands — a young man's hands, thick-knuckled, a callus along the side of the right forefinger from the handle of something he's held ten thousand times, the cleft in his chin the only thing you can't feel except in a mirror he hasn't found yet in this apartment. You turn the hand over once, like checking it's really attached.

"Home," you say, to the empty room, in his voice, and it isn't a lie exactly — it's just not yet clear whose word it is.