Cody Threadgill

The screen has been the whole night. Nothing on, nothing worth the scroll, the kind of blue-lit hour where you click through the same four tabs until one of them isn't like the others. Vessel.cards. You'd found it three days ago and not believed it, the way you never quite believed any of the message boards, the sleep paranormal threads, the found-footage nothing that always turned out to be a guy with a ring light. You have wanted this since before you can date it — not any one body, just the fact of another one, the door of it. You pay. The wheel is ugly and a little slow, a spinning wedge of faces blurred too fast to read, and then it isn't spinning.

It stops on him mid-breath, and so do you.

The arm goes first — the one hanging off the mattress, dead weight, drawn up like a diver surfacing, and the rest of him rolls with it onto his back, hands folding at his chest like a man laid out for a viewing. The ragged pull of breath evens into something slow and unhurried. Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtain in one flat blade across the sheets. You are being breathed by lungs that are not decision, not yet — they were already doing this, and now you are only riding them, the ribs rising under a gray T-shirt, the mattress too soft in a way that isn't yours to have an opinion about, because there is no yours yet. There is only the fact of a body, warm, heavy, twenty years in it, and you have arrived in the exact second it stopped being anybody's but yours.

The room comes first through the sheets — cheap cotton, washed too many times, a smell of fabric softener laid over something sourer underneath, sweat and old beer that never quite airs out. Then the shirt against your back, and it opens like a door left on a chain: a hand — his hand, this hand — pulling this same shirt over his head that morning, if you can call eleven a.m. a morning when the shift ran till four and sleep didn't start till six. Graveyard, he'd have said, and laughed once at the pun the first week and never again after. The cemetery is out past the interstate, live oaks and Bermuda grass baked pale, and he digs there before the heat gets ugly, or he used to, before they moved his crew to nights to dodge it — which is why eleven in the morning is the dead middle of his sleep and not the start of his day, why the curtains are blackout and taped at the edges, why the girlfriend on the other side of that gap in the mattress is already gone to her own job and the apartment is his alone to keep dark.

Her side. You feel that before you feel anything else — the cooler sheet where a body isn't, a groove worn into the mattress that his hip already knows how to find without looking. Her name comes up through the pillow smell, lavender detergent, and then the whole shape of her: quick laugh, a temper that blows through fast and doesn't linger, three years of her toothbrush next to his in a cup shaped like a mason jar. He loves her uncomplicatedly, the way he loves very little else uncomplicatedly. There was a girl before her whose name doesn't come — not hidden, just not there, the door for it rusted shut from disuse. Before her: nobody who counts.

The tattoos on the forearm are next, because the arm is under you, pinned a little by your own new weight, and the ink comes up through the skin like something remembered by the nerve instead of the eye. Script along the inside of the forearm — his mother's name, Eliza, and under it a psalm his aunt made him promise to carry somewhere on his body before she died, chosen because it was the one she used to say over him as a boy at a kitchen table in Marietta, Alcohol has done more, no — Praise is due Him, he can't get the exact words to surface, only the certainty of the verse being right, being hers. A date under a different name, smaller, that he got at nineteen and has never once explained to anyone who asked, not even her — not a girlfriend, not a friend, just a date that costs him something every time his sleeve rides up in front of somebody at the graveside crew and they clock it and don't ask twice.

The body underneath all of it: twenty years old, six-foot-two stretched long under thin cotton, a build that isn't gym-made, it's shovel-made, forearms harder than the rest of him, a lower back that already aches faintly even in sleep from bending over clay all week, knees that know how to kneel at a grave edge without thinking. A tongue that finds a familiar rawness at the gumline — dip, a can he'll want before he wants coffee, want it so bad some mornings his hand goes looking for the tin before his eyes are open. A thirst underneath that, older and worse, the kind that isn't about water — a bottle kept somewhere his girlfriend has stopped pretending not to see, guilt sitting right alongside the wanting of it, Sunday mornings at a church that tells him what he is doing to himself and Tuesday nights when he does it anyway.

None of it is loud. He is not a man anything is wrong with, on the surface — average build, ordinary face, the kind of nothing-in-particular you'd walk past at a gas station and never once look back at. That's its own small mercy, coming into him: nobody's eyes are on this body, and so no one is going to notice, yet, that the eyes behind it are new.

Your — his — hands are still folded at his chest, the posture he has never once slept in, some other geometry laid over him like a sheet pulled straight. You bring them up in front of his face in the dim striped light. Turn them over. The nails are bitten short, a white paint fleck ground into one knuckle that memory says is joint compound, not headstone dust, from patching a wall for her last weekend. They are his hands doing exactly what hands do, and they have never once belonged to you, and they are the only hands you have got now, this morning, this century, however long this turns out to last.

You say it out loud, to the dark, to the gap of streetlight, in his own unhurried voice: "Okay."

Not a decision. Not a name for what happens next. Just the sound of a mouth finding out it still works, while somewhere behind your eyes the wheel is still spinning, waiting, patient, for whenever you decide to feed it again.