Colby Rhoades

You are standing in a stockroom that smells like bleach and gun oil, a flashlight heavy in Danilo Corrales's hand, and you have been him for maybe forty seconds when you already know you're done with him. It's Monday afternoon in San Francisco, the loading dock door is stuck at a slant letting in one blade of gray light, and some other guard is talking to you about a delivery you don't care about. Danilo's knees ache in a way that isn't yours to fix. His radio crackles. You feel, distantly, the outline of a life — a daughter he calls on Sundays, a mortgage, a rosary in the truck — none of it asked for, none of it wanted. Forty seconds of a tired man's Monday is enough. You set the flashlight on the shelf mid-sentence, walk to the little office in back where nobody's looking, and open the site on the ancient desktop they use for delivery logs. The wheel is already loading before the guard finishes his question.

You spin.

The couch takes your weight before you understand it's a couch. Leather, warm from a body that was already sitting in it, cool air-conditioned dark around you, a television throwing colors nobody is home enough to laugh at. Your hand — his hand — has already set the remote down on the arm of the couch, and you watch, from just behind his eyes, the rest of a joke land on a laugh track that gets no laugh back. Long legs stretched to the coffee table. One sock on, one foot bare against a rug gone thin in a stripe down the middle. Outside these walls it's evening, cicadas throttling the air, but in here it's dark enough to be any hour, and you understand before you understand anything else that you are enormous inside this body — tall in a way that changes how a couch holds you.

The shirt is what opens first. Gray, a chest pocket, damp at the collar still from a shower that didn't fully take — and through it comes practice: turf under him, a coach's whistle cutting off mid-note, the particular ringing tired of legs that ran sprints after everyone else got to stop. Colby Rhoades. The name arrives with the jersey number, muscle memory more than thought. Locker room fluorescents, a towel snapped somewhere down the row, someone's bad music out of a phone speaker. He is twenty-one and his shoulders already know forty more years of mornings like this one, or he hopes they do — the hope comes through too, faint and specific, a kid's hope wearing a grown man's frame.

The shorts against his thighs bring the drive home, windows down against the heat that doesn't quit even after the sun gives up, gas station Gatorade sweating in the cupholder. The mullet — you feel it without seeing it, weight of it at his neck when he tips his head back into the couch cushion — brings a barbershop chair, his cousin laughing, his mother's face doing something complicated between pride and horror. Small stuff. A life with no scar in it, no ring, no one waiting up. Single, and fine with it. Beer with the guys on a Thursday, nothing stronger, never smoked, never wanted to. Mass some Sundays when his conscience outvotes his hangover. None of it big. All of it his.

The watch on the wrist is the last thing, cheap band, scratched face, a gift from somebody whose face doesn't come with it — and dressing this morning arrives whole: pulling the shirt over the same shoulders, stepping into shorts still turf-green at the hem, lacing shoes that already knew the shape of his feet before his feet were done growing into them. Getting ready for a day that turned out ordinary and ended on this couch, chips torn open beside him, wrappers he'll deal with tomorrow, a body that is tired the honest way, legs sore high in the thigh, a blister he's been ignoring on the little toe of the foot still wearing its sock.

You look down at his hand on your own thigh, wide-knuckled, a little sunburned across the back of it, nothing on any finger. You turn it over like you're checking it for damage. Then you look up, off the television and into the dark room, and past it, past the ceiling, at nothing in particular.

"Whoever's watching," you say, out loud, to the empty house, "I got no idea what you just did."