Cody Strasser

You are standing in a rented photography apartment in Eastern Kentucky, in a body that is not yours and never will be, and the mirror across the room keeps catching Marcus Deveraux's face doing things you didn't tell it to do — a twitch at the mouth, a stillness in the eyes that a dimpled 26-year-old's face was never built to hold. You have been him for under a minute and already the fit is wrong in the specific way they are all wrong eventually: not the body, the body is beautiful, but the life keeps leaking in around the edges, a phone buzzing with a name you don't want to answer to, a text still open from someone who loves a man who left the room two hundred and seventy-seven bodies ago. You did not come back for Marcus. You came back because the wheel is a door and doors are for going through, because the buzzing phone is his problem and not a problem you intend to solve, because there is a specific silence that happens right after you win — a rich, private silence — and you have learned you cannot sit in it long. You open the site on his phone with his thumb. The wheel is already spinning before you've finished deciding.

The power drops for two seconds in a shop that smells like green soap and cigarettes twenty years cold, and when it comes back you are the one behind the eyes, and the arm under the needle has gone still in a way the artist notices before you do — he glances up, mutters something about you handling pain like a champ, and goes back to the linework. You are big now. Big in the shoulders, big through the middle, a heaviness that sits low and solid, nothing like the coiled lightness you just stepped out of. The stool creaks under new weight. Somewhere behind your sternum a heartbeat is going slower than it was ten seconds ago, unhurried, a heart used to being the calm one in a room full of men hitting things.

The green soap is the first key. It's still pooling in the crook of your arm, cold and slick, and it opens straight into a memory that isn't yours: standing corner-side at the Alhambra gym at six a.m., a kid named Ruiz bleeding at the eyebrow and Cody's own hands — thick, freckled, sure — pressing the styptic in with a rag that smelled the same chemical green. Fear that isn't fear, exactly. The particular calm of a man who has seen worse cuts and knows this one closes. That's what these hands know without being asked: how to stop bleeding, how to wrap a hand in gauze eighteen times the same practiced way, how to hold a pad steady while somebody younger throws everything they have at it and flinches less than you do.

The shirt is next — not this shirt, the shirt this morning, the one still hanging over a chair in a house with a kid's booster seat in the kitchen. Putting it on: reaching it overhead with the stiffness that lives permanently in the left shoulder now, an old fight injury nobody but a physical therapist has ever gotten a straight story out of him about. Rolling the sleeve up past the tattoo — the fine-line geometric thing on the upper arm that a woman named Danielle talked him into getting six years ago, back when she was still calling him baby and not just Dad-when-convenient. That's the thing under his sternum that this session is actually for: not the design, the timing. Getting inked the same month Danielle started seeing someone else's father at pickup. A small, stupid, entirely human decision, sitting still for three hours so somebody could put something permanent on him while something else came apart on schedule.

The chair under you, low and hydraulic, gives a memory of a different chair — ringside, folding, the particular fatigue of standing twelve rounds of somebody else's fight from the outside, screaming instruction nobody can hear over the ropes, and loving it anyway, loving the swinging bags after close, the smell of a gym nobody's aired out since 1994. Freckles across the nose that a girlfriend right now, the current one, likes to kiss in order like a route she's memorized. A daughter, four, who thinks the pompadour is the funniest thing a grown man can do to his own head and tells him so daily.

None of it is yours. All of it sits in the arm, the shoulder, the low unhurried heart, waiting for you to reach for something else and let it in again.

You look down at the hand not currently pinned to the table — freckled knuckles, a thin white scar you didn't earn across two of them — and you turn it once in the tattoo shop's bad fluorescent light like you're checking it's real.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, to no one, to the artist, to the two hundred and seventy-eight men you have now been, and you don't know yet if that's true or how long you'll be around to find out.