Cody Michalak

You are standing in a stagehand's kitchen wearing a stagehand's hands, and the clock over the stove says it is later than a Sunday should be allowed to feel. Ruben Castellanos's body is skinny in a way that surprises you every time — the shoulders narrow, the knees loud when they bend — and you have been him for two minutes, which is not long enough to learn a single thing about him except that his feet ache and his apartment smells like a theater he hasn't worked in for days. You didn't come back for him. You came back because two minutes was enough to know you didn't want the rest of tonight in this. There's a coffee ring on the counter that isn't yours and never will be. You go to the site instead. The wheel doesn't ask why. It never has.

It gives you a hose running and a wrist already turning.

Your — his — thumb is tucked against the sponge, working small circles into a black door panel, suds sliding down in ropes that used to leave swirl marks and now, in this one motion, don't. The light is going orange and low across a yard of hardpan and sagebrush, throwing a shadow off the trailer behind you long and blue across the concrete. You feel thirty in the knees before you feel it anywhere else — solid, unbothered, a body that has never once questioned itself. The water's cold where it splashes your boot. Somewhere behind your face a badge you're not wearing right now is still sitting on a dresser, and the muscle memory of its weight is already trying to tell you something.

The sponge is what opens first. Foam between fingers, grit of a coarse patch worked soft — and Cody's hands know this door, this car, better than they know most people. A flash: him at nineteen, first cruiser wash after his rookie year, his FTO telling him a dirty patrol car is a lazy cop, and something in him deciding, right there, to never be the lazy one. Then the shirt against your back — his gray tee, worn thin at the collar — gives you this morning, sleeve by sleeve: pulling it over his head still smelling of the sheets, Amber already up and gone to get their girl from her mother's, the trailer quiet in the particular way it gets when it's just him and the coffee maker ticking. He'd stood in front of the mirror a second longer than usual, thumb finding the cleft in his chin the way he always does, not vain, just checking he's still the same guy.

The jeans know the shape of a duty belt that isn't on them right now, a phantom weight at the hip he half-misses on days off. The boots remember eleven-hour shifts, remember standing at the edge of a rollover on 95 with the flares burning red into a black sky, remember leaning against a cruiser at dusk in a gravel lot with nothing on the radio and nothing to do but watch the light die over the ridgeline, which he does most shifts, which is most of what the job actually is.

The tattoo at his collar burns without hurting — Michalak, and a date, script across his shoulder blade where he can't see it without two mirrors, inked the week his daughter was born, his wife's hand steady on his arm the whole four hours because he'd gone white as the sheet. That memory pulls another behind it: Shauna in the delivery room, the sound she made, and how nothing before or since has come close to touching it. And then, uninvited, a different room, a different woman — Kayleigh, the ex, eight months of something he still doesn't have a clean word for, ended four months back, ended badly enough that he still checks his phone half a second too long when it buzzes at odd hours, hoping and dreading in exactly equal parts. The wedding band on the hand holding the sponge is warm from the sun. He never takes it off, not for shift, not for showers, not for anything.

The car itself gives up nothing — just a car, black, paid for, his one nice thing — but the driveway under your bare — his — boots holds the whole shape of a life: sagebrush at the step, a trailer on blocks that they've talked about leaving twice and stayed in both times, the particular hard blue that shadows go here right before the sun quits for good. He isn't rich and he's never pretended to want to be. He vapes because he quit real cigarettes the year the baby came and never finished quitting all the way. He drinks maybe twice a month, hard, with the guys from shift, and is fine every other night to just sit on the step and watch the light do this exact thing it's doing right now.

You look down. The hand is broad, sun-browned, a thumb tucked into a sponge gone gray with soap, a plain ring catching the last orange light. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real, like it might not hold.

You lift your eyes to the empty yard as if there were a lens in the sagebrush, and you say, out loud, to nobody: "Twenty," — counting, though he'll never know what.