Colby Marsh

The bar smells like fryer grease and Marcus Otey's whole life, and you have had enough of both.

Nineteen minutes ago you spun into this body — fifty years old, a gut that pulls at the apron string, a nose that healed crooked sometime before you got here — and it was fine, it was even good for the first ten. There was a woman at the end of the bar who knew him, who touched his forearm like she'd touched it a hundred times, and you let her, because that's what he would have done. Then she asked about her son. Marcus's memory came up through her hand on his arm — a nephew, actually, some kid in trouble with a landlord — and you had to stand there behind this stranger's face doing math you didn't have the pieces for, nodding, saying *he'll figure it out* in a voice that wasn't rehearsed enough. She left unsatisfied. You felt it land in his chest like a debt you didn't ask for and can't pay off, and that's the thing about the older ones, the ones with people who know them — they come with weight already on them, and you are so tired, after ten spins, of borrowing men who owe things.

You wipe the bar down once, twice, feel the ache set into this lower back that isn't going anywhere, and think: enough. Something younger. Something with less behind it. You go to the office, pull up the site on your phone with his thick fingers, and spin.

The wheel turns and you are three miles from someone else's home.

Both hands come off a steering wheel that a second ago belonged to someone with fingers wrapped tight at ten and two, and you resettle them lower, wider, the way you actually drive. Dash light green on your knuckles. The car drifted a foot and pulled itself straight before you even had a body to do it with, like the road already knew you were coming. Your thumb finds the turn signal without you deciding to and clicks it up — an exit that means nothing to you, that meant nothing to him either, some old habit stored in the muscle three seconds before you got here. Outside the windshield: not city glow, not the skyline this dash was aimed at in whatever photo got taken of him — just black highway, a last smear of afternoon going copper at the edges of black spruce. Afternoon. You left a bar at the tail end of a Dallas evening and arrived in an Alaskan Monday still bright enough to hurt, and for one full second that seam in the day is the strangest thing that has ever happened to you, stranger than the spinning itself.

The seatbelt is tight across a chest that's flat and hard where Marcus's was soft, and that alone is a kind of relief you feel before you feel anything else — twenty-two years old, you understand at once, from the read of your own shoulders, the quickness in your wrists correcting the wheel. Then the shirt. Black cotton, worn soft at the collar, and it gives you a flash: a photographer's assistant snapping it off a hanger, *try the black, warmer against you than the white* — a studio somewhere, hot lights, someone's hand adjusting your collar like you were furniture. Then more: an agency office, a woman with a folder saying *editorial's a good look for you, Colby*, and the name arrives folded into that memory like it was always going to. Colby. It sits strange and then it doesn't.

The steering wheel under your palms gives you driving — hundreds of hours of it, this exact road, this exact fatigue at the end of a long booking day, eyes gritty, a migraine coming up slow behind the left one like weather. Your hand finds a ring you're not wearing today for some reason — no, wait, it's not on your finger, it's a phantom motion, thumb rubbing at bare skin where a ring usually rides, left at home on the dresser this morning because it caught on a wardrobe assistant's sleeve last week and someone told him to leave it. The gesture keeps happening anyway. Old comfort with nothing in its hand.

The jacket against your back — no, tank top, memory correcting itself, that was this morning, before the black tee, before the second setup — gives you the studio in full: cold room, then hot lights, a stylist tugging the strap straight, the photographer saying *good, good, chin down a little, there it is* at the dimples that show even when you're not smiling, that have shown up in every headshot since you were nineteen and got you noticed at a mall kiosk in the first place. You remember hating that job and doing it anyway because it paid better than anything else available to a guy with a GED and a face. You remember Anchorage in February, the light gone by four, and how this same face looked strange and soft-lit and expensive under studio bulbs compared to how it looks in the bathroom mirror of an apartment with a snowmobile parked under a blue tarp out back, plywood siding gone silver with weather.

You remember her — not fully, just enough, an ex who still has a way of showing up in the corners of things, a laugh that used to happen in this car, a jacket of hers still balled in the trunk that you keep meaning to mail and don't. You remember the vape in the cupholder, three hits before merging onto this exact stretch, nicotine flattening the ache starting behind your eye. You remember cash counted twice on a kitchen table, not enough of it, ever quite enough, and a mother's voice on the phone last week asking when you're coming down for a real job, and you telling her modeling *is* a real job, and neither of you believing it all the way.

The car is still moving. Three miles from a home you have never seen and already half-know — the smell of it, cold and near, coming up through the vents.

You look down at your hands on the wheel — no ring, blond hair at the wrist, a callus at the base of the thumb from something the body remembers and you don't yet — and you laugh, short, disbelieving, the dimples cutting in at rest just like the file said they would.

"Okay," you say to the windshield, to no one, "let's see what you're worth."