Colby Nash

The knife is the problem. Warren Suggs's knife, the good boning one, worn thin as a leaf from thirty years of the same stroke, and you have been standing behind his counter for fifty-nine minutes learning what his hands already know without you: how to find the seam in a shoulder blind, how to talk to the Saturday regulars about nothing, how to make the register drawer stick and then not stick with the same practiced heel of the palm. It is a good body. It is a body that does not wheeze, that eats what it wants, that has a house on a canal and grandkids who visit on Sundays. None of that is why you are already reaching for your phone with a rime of fat still on your borrowed fingers. It's that the knife is the problem — the sameness of it, the fiftieth stroke feeling exactly like the first, a whole life narrowed down to this precise and satisfying competence and nothing else ever again. You did not spin the wheel seventeen times to find a man who is good at one thing. You open vessel.cards with a thumb that still smells like brine, and you spin, and Miami afternoon light slides off the screen as something else opens its eyes two thousand miles away, mid-morning, under a rack of iron.

You are gripping a barbell two inches wider than you've set your hands all year, and the rep is going down slow, too slow, the kind of slow that should feel like failure and instead feels like nothing at all, because the man whose arms these are was one breath from racking it and you are not him yet, not for another half second, and then you are. The bar rises. It is heavy in a way that means something to muscles you didn't grow. Somewhere above you, fluorescent tubes; somewhere behind you, a rack of colored fabric rolls waiting for a shoot that hasn't started. You hear yourself grunt through the last inch of it and the sound is unfamiliar in your own throat, which is not your throat, which was never yours.

The bar clacks into the rack. Your arms drop, and that's the first contact — forearms against the tops of your thighs, damp gym shorts, the specific ache of triceps that have done this exact motion four thousand times in a life you didn't live — and it comes through like a struck bell: Colby, fifteen years old, asthma pump rattling in a gym bag, a coach telling him lungs like his don't get to skip leg day just because they complain. The inhaler is in the vest pocket right now, you realize, a small hard shape you haven't touched yet but already know is there the way you know your own pulse.

Your hand finds the water bottle on the floor, sweating, and that's the second door: him buying a case of them at Numero Uno on Sunday because Danielle likes the number "23" printed on the cap for some reason she's never explained and he loves that she has reasons like that, small and hers. Danielle. The wife. You get her in pieces — a laugh that goes up at the end like a question, the smell of her shampoo on the passenger seat of the car he never bothers to clean, an argument eight months back about money that ended with him photographing a stranger's wedding for less than he's worth because scraping by is what this is, month over month, an assistant's day rate and a dream of shooting something that isn't someone else's Tuesday.

Then the shirt — you're wearing it, gray, soft from too many washes — and the memory of putting it on this morning arrives sleeve-first, the way it always does: him standing in the bedroom with the blinds still down, Danielle asleep with one arm thrown over her eyes, the vest already laid out over a chair because he'd packed the bag last night like he always does, methodical about the one part of his life he can control. The camera. Right hand finds a phantom weight, remembers a Canon body settling into the meat of the palm just so, remembers the particular click that means the light did what he wanted for once. There's a woman in there too, from before Danielle — Ashley, seven years gone, who left for Portland and a man who did not carry a reflector against his hip for a living, and you feel the small permanent hollow where she used to be, visited occasionally like a tooth you know is missing only when you bite down wrong. He does not talk about her. He barely lets himself think about her. You are thinking about her now because his hands, without him, without you, are already curling into fists at his sides — not from missing her, just the old tic, the jaw clenching too, a habit older than the ring on his finger, older than the vest, older than any of it.

The ring. Left hand, plain band, worn smooth. It knows the shape of another hand it isn't holding right now, and for a second that's the whole story: a man standing in a courtyard of dry palms with sweat cooling under a shirt he chose without thinking, thirty-three years old, average in every measurable way, married to a woman who is at this moment probably asleep in a room he'll go home to eventually, worth whatever a good eye and a bad economy will pay him, believing in something he couldn't name if you asked him, breathing fine, breathing easy, no wheeze at all — which is its own quiet miracle he never thinks to notice.

You look down at the hands on your knees. They are not thick from thirty years of butchering. They are lighter, quicker, a photographer's hands, and they are shaking very slightly the way hands do after the last hard set of a life that isn't yours yet and now is. You turn one over, study the callus at the base of the trigger finger that has nothing to do with any trigger.

"Two more," you say out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't yet know if you mean the set.