Colby Haverlin

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The site loads slow on a connection that's never been great at this hour, and the wheel just sits there spinning lazy colors while you wait for a page to finish deciding what it is. Vessel.cards. You found it the way you find everything now, three links deep off a thread that shouldn't have existed, and you didn't believe it, and you paid anyway, because not believing it has never once stopped you from wanting it. Waking up as someone else. The oldest want you have, older than any particular person you've wanted to be, and tonight is nothing — the kind of nothing that makes room for a stupid decision at a stupid hour. You spin before you can talk yourself out of it.

The wheel stops.

You are halfway through a motion you did not start.

Your arm is up, wrist bent, a scanner in your hand with its trigger already half-depressed, and a box on the shelf in front of you has a barcode on it you were about to put a red laser line across and did not. The beep doesn't come. Your hand — his hand — hangs there a half-second too long, and then the line runs crooked across the label and the scanner chirps wrong, a flat double-tone that means try again, and you do, slower, like you're relearning where your own fingers end.

A forklift beeps somewhere behind a rack you can't see. Fluorescent light, warm with afternoon coming through a window too high to be useful. Your collar is damp. Everything smells like cardboard dust and the orange safety vest you are wearing, which is heavier than you expected, stiffened at the shoulders with old sweat gone dry.

The vest gives you the first of it before you've even thought to ask. A name on the inside tag in laundry marker, half-rubbed-off, and under it — a locker room, longer ago than this body, fourteen years old and getting his ear folded wrong in practice, the guy on top of him grinning through a mouthguard, and nobody stopping it fast enough, and afterward the ear just stayed that shape, a soft lumpy weight on the side of his head he still runs a thumb over sometimes without meaning to. You find your own thumb doing it now, unbidden, like the hand remembers a habit you don't.

The polo shirt under the vest remembers the morning it went on: dark, a room with a mattress on the floor and no sheets, an alarm that said eleven at night and felt like morning anyway because the shift runs through the dead hours, because somebody has to move pallets while the casino upstairs keeps the machines running for people who never see this room. He pulled the shirt over his head still tasting last night's first beer of six, a ritual more than a drink, the can opened the second the apartment door closed behind him like a bell ending a round. Heavy, steady, unbothered — never anything stronger, never anything smoked, his mother having drilled enough church into him early that nicotine at least felt like a door he never opened, even as the drinking opened every other one.

The belt remembers being pulled through loops too fast, late again. The boots remember concrete, miles of it, year on year, an ache set permanently into both heels that isn't pain exactly anymore, just weather. The eyebrow barbell is cold under your own exploring fingertip, a sixteen-year-old's dare to himself that his mother cried about and he kept anyway, small and stupid and his.

And the back piece — you can't see it, but you feel it stretched across your shoulder blades under the shirt, the weight of ink he doesn't think about except when someone asks, and when someone asks he tells them it was going to be more, a whole back of saints, and it stalled at the cross and the praying hands because the money stopped and then the appointments stopped and then it had just been a few years, and some version of him still means to finish it. He believes, in the loose unchurched way of a man who hasn't been inside a building for it since he was a kid sitting between his mother and his aunt, stiff shoes, bored stiff, but who still says grace sometimes alone in his truck over a gas station sandwich, quiet, like it costs nothing to keep a hand in.

No wife ever got close enough to leave a mark here. No kids. A string of women who liked him fine and didn't stay, and a couple of friends from the floor he drinks with on off nights, and nothing that would leave an ache behind if it were gone. Twenty-two years old, saved more than you'd guess for a man who drinks like this — some stubborn thread of his father's accounting running under the chaos, money that sits in an account and doesn't move, like proof to nobody that he's not just this.

The scanner's weight settles into your palm the way a tool settles when a hand has held it ten thousand times, and you feel the job in the body before you feel it in thought — knees slightly soft, weight already shifting to the next aisle before you've decided to move, the whole stance of a man who could do this unconscious, and today, for one stuttering handful of seconds, is not.

You stop. You lower the scanner. You look down at your hand like it arrived in the mail.

It's broader than hands you don't have. Scraped across two knuckles, nail bitten short on the thumb, a thin white worry-line where a ring was never worn. You turn it over once, slow, in the stale amber light coming down between the racks, and somewhere behind you the forklift beeps again, patient, going on without you.

"Who the hell," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't the one you came with, "am I."

You don't know yet how long you get to ask it.