Cody Shumate

Kevin Iwasaki's apartment smells like the microwave burrito he didn't finish, and the laptop light is doing that thing to his face where forty-one looks like fifty. He's got his shoes still on, sitting on the edge of a bed he's slept in five hundred and thirty-four times as somebody else's memory of a stranger. The sales calls tomorrow are the same sales calls as every tomorrow. Nothing wrong with this body — the nose that healed crooked, the gut going soft, hands that know a keyboard and nothing else worth knowing — it's just that it is Friday almost-midnight and there is a wheel that owes you nothing and gives everything, and the wanting comes back the way hunger does, without asking whether you already ate. You open the site. You don't decide, exactly. Your thumb decides. It spins.

The dark is different first — warmer, close, a phone screen instead of a laptop, and the weight under you is younger, lighter, a body that could run somewhere and enjoy it. The thumb that isn't yet yours keeps moving on the screen, faster now, steadier, past a girl's photo he'd have paused on, past a truck he wanted, and none of it registers because you are still arriving, still finding the edges of him — six feet of him, lean muscle gone soft with sleep, a fringe of hair against a brow that isn't creased with anything yet.

Then his shirt tells you the first thing: gray cotton, thin from washing, and it comes with a locker room, a coach's whistle, a lion crest stitched somewhere he can't see it but knows is there, on his own skin now, inked instead of embroidered — he did that one on a dare after the district championship, seventeen years old, half a beer in him, laughing at the pain because everyone else was watching. The phone in his hand carries a girl who stopped texting back in March, no grudge left in it, just a small flat place where wanting used to be. The pillow under his cheek is his mother's old pillowcase, cotton going thin, and it gives you a kitchen in the daytime, her voice telling him to eat something before the bus, years and years of that kitchen stacked one on top of the other until they're just a smell.

The dog tags at his throat are cold and then not, and they open the widest door: the gravel lot at 0430, breath fogging, boots not yet broken in, a drill sergeant's voice that stopped scaring him around week six and started sounding almost like relief, like being told exactly what a day was for. His hands know push-ups without thinking, know the particular ache in the shoulder from carrying too much on the last ruck march, know how to fold a shirt into a square so tight it could stop a bullet, ha ha, that's the joke they all make. He remembers dressing this morning — no, yesterday morning, whichever one it actually was, the muscle of it more than the memory: multicam over his head, sleeves rolled to the exact fold regulation wants, boots laced bottom to top in one motion because his hands have done it four hundred times and don't need him anymore. He remembers being proud of that, quietly, the way you're proud of a thing nobody else would think to be proud of.

He is single and he is fine with that, mostly, on the nights he doesn't think about it. He drinks maybe twice a month and smokes only then, cheap cigarettes shared off the tailgate of somebody's truck under a water tower that has somebody's initials spray-painted on the leg from 2003. He has forty dollars and a truck payment and a barracks room that isn't really his. None of it worries him. Something in him — some flat Protestant patience passed down without much ceremony — has always assumed things work out or they don't, and either way you show up at 0500.

You feel all of that land in a body that is twenty-two and does not hurt anywhere yet, that has never once in its life needed a second thought to stand up out of bed.

You look at your hands — his hands, tanned to the wrist, a lion inked pale in the phone's blue light, the thumb still twitching once from muscle memory before it goes still. You turn them over like you're checking they're real, and out past them the room is dark and small and smells like laundry detergent and somebody else's mother.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't broken in yet either.