Cody Mullins

Connor Reilly's moustache itches, and that is the first thing I know about being him. Fifteen minutes, and the lip still feels like something glued on. The dorm room hums with other people's sleep. A roommate's fan turns on the far side of the wall. Connor's thumb is the one on the trackpad, the one that learned the trick of it in an afternoon, and it is already tired of the page I am reading.

Nothing is wrong with him. He is eighteen and quick and warm. He has a mother who texts at night, and a lanyard on the hook that opens the doors of a city I do not want. But he is five foot ten, and standing in him is like standing in a room where the ceiling is always a little close. I keep reaching for a shelf that is not there. I keep wanting to be looked at from far away and not from across a table. So I go back to the wheel. I pay, and the wheel turns, and I let it.

Then there is no dorm. The fan is gone and the ceiling is gone.

I am lying on my side in the dark with a phone six inches from my face, blue light on one cheek, and my thumb has stopped halfway down a page of something I did not choose. I start it again. It moves faster than it was moving, and steadier, past everything he had paused on. Eyes open. The screen is dry against them. I have not blinked in a while.

The mattress sags under a long frame. My feet find the end of the bed and stop at the footboard, and I have to curl them. Height. Two hundred centimetres of it folded onto a bed made for someone smaller. My knees are drawn up. A hip aches the dull way of a hip that has taken a fall and said nothing.

The sheet is under my forearm, cotton gone soft from washing. It gives me something, and it is not mine.

A morning. Cold floor, the kind of cold that comes up through the boards in the hollow. He sits on the edge of this same bed and pulls the thermal over his head, one sleeve and then the other, the cuff catching at the knuckle, and he is already thinking of the filly. A bay, young, who would not take the line yesterday and went flat-eared at the rail. Over the thermal goes the vest, snaps one by one, left hand fumbling the third because the glove is already on. His jaw is tight. He does not know it is. The vest smells of hay dust and the dog he does not own, a neighbour's, who follows him down to the creek.

The sweatshirt I lie in now is the same grey as that thermal, thinner, the pocket on the chest holding the edge of his phone's old case. The pants have a drawstring I tangle with a finger. Under the fabric his body is lean and long and sound. The legs ache to walk.

My jaw is clenched. I notice it only because something in me unclenches it, and it clenches again on its own.

On my right forearm there is script, a name and a date, inked in. When I turn the arm to the light the letters lie along the skin like handwriting. The skin there remembers the needle. It is a sharp, stinging, lovely afternoon, a chair, a friend laughing, a man who held his arm flat and said hold still, Cody. Cody. The word lands in the body like a coin in a well. His grief is not mine and it comes anyway, heavy and clean, someone who is not coming back. I do not read the name. I will not do that in his first minute.

A small silver hoop in my left ear, cold where it meets the pillow. A pastor's voice somewhere, a long Sunday, a hand on his shoulder in a church with a gravel lot. He believed. He still half does. Beer in the fridge down the hall, one or two most nights, a cigarette he quit and still reaches for at the screen door. The debt is in him too, a low hum under the ribs, a number he does not say aloud, the truck and the vet bills and the lease on the round pen. Underwater. He has been breathing like it for a year.

And the pen. The sand, the circling horse, the line singing through his fingers, the quiet he makes with his shoulders so a thousand pounds of animal will listen. My hands know the weight of that line. They have never held one.

I set the phone down on the sheet. Dark takes the room back. I lift my right hand and turn it over, palm, knuckles, palm, the long fingers, the calluses that are not mine and are. Then I look up, into nothing, into the whole dark of his ceiling.

"Hey, Cody," I say, low, in his voice, which is deeper than I expected and slower. "Hey."

The jaw clenches. The creek is out there somewhere, under the bridge. Nobody in the house knows. I lie still and listen to how long this takes.