Colby Stennett

The trowel is still in your hand when you decide. Damon Osceola's hand — thick-fingered, nails packed black with Kentucky clay, a cleft in the chin you have caught in truck mirrors for less than a minute now and already resent a little, because a face should feel earned and this one was only won. The dig site has gone quiet around you, screens and sifting trays, somebody's radio playing something with a fiddle in it. You made this body kneel in a five-by-five square of dirt for an hour before you understood that patience is a thing that belongs to Damon and not to you — he loved this, would have loved it, is loving it somewhere underneath you the way a song keeps playing after you leave the room. You do not want to find out what a whole life of this is like from the inside. You want out from under his loving it. You stand, wipe the trowel on your thigh, and you are already reaching for your phone before your other hand finishes the motion, already at vessel.cards, already watching the wheel spin with the dumb, hungry patience of a man who has done this eighteen times and stopped pretending to himself it is anything but a hunger.

The wheel lands.

You are face-down. Sheets under you smell like fabric softener and someone else's sleep. One arm is hanging off the edge of a mattress into cooler air, and you feel — before you feel anything else — the specific, total absence of ache in your knees, in your back, no dirt under these nails, and the shock of that absence is almost worse than pain would be. The breathing that was ragged, that was some other man's ragged, goes even in a single pull. The hanging arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back on its own decision, not yours exactly and not his anymore either, and the hands fold at the chest like a man laid out for a viewing, which he has never once done in his sleep, and would find strange, if there were a him left to find it strange.

Light comes through a gap in blackout curtains, thin as a knife, and it is the wrong hour for a man to be lying down. You know this the way you know the taste of a place you've never visited — a truck door's tin smell, a walk-in cooler's cold. The shirt is not on you yet, it's balled somewhere at the foot of the bed, but your bare shoulder against the sheet gives you the first flash anyway: whites. A stiff collar. Snaps instead of buttons because buttons pop off into food.

You reach down — no, he reaches down, and you ride it — and your hand finds the shirt bunched in the sheets, and touching it opens like a door left on the latch.

Colby Stennett, twenty-eight, and the shirt remembers five-forty this morning, the apron over it stained the way it always gets stained by ten a.m. and never comes fully white again no matter what the laundry does, sleeves rolled to the elbow because a chef told him once that a man who cooks with his sleeves down is a man asking to get burned and he never rolled them down since. The line at Ruth's Chophouse off the highway, ticket rail clacking, the particular animal focus of six pans going at once and none of them allowed to be wrong. He is good at it, better than he'd say out loud — his hands know the weight of a pan without him watching them, know when a steak is a minute from being ruined by the give of it under a thumb, know a hundred small weights and heats that never once needed a thought. His knuckles carry old grease-burn marks he doesn't call scars because everyone in that kitchen has them and calling them anything is precious. His forearms remember reaching into an oven at the worst possible angle, remember the particular sting of a fryer spitting, remember being twenty-two and lit up with how much he loved being fast at something.

His feet on this carpet remember the gravel road outside, gray dust that gets into everything, the truck's bench seat, the water tower on the horizon he has looked at every day of his life without once thinking a thing about it. The pillow under what was his head an hour ago carries the smell of a woman's shampoo — Reagan, whose voice he hears saying his name in a register he can only call fond, whose photo is somewhere on a nightstand he hasn't touched yet, whose laugh made a bad Tuesday shift feel survivable. And under that, distant, still capable of a small ache: another name, older, a girl he thought for two years he was going to marry, and didn't, and still sometimes drives past her mother's house on the gravel road for no reason he'd admit to Reagan or anyone.

The nails — his fingers find each other, thumb worrying at the edge of the index nail, already bitten short and rough, a habit that lives below thought, that started in a stepfather's house he does not want to remember and the shirt does not give you more of, mercifully, and you do not go looking.

He came home from a double, off by six, meant to eat something and instead lay down face-first still dressed and woke enough once to kick his shoes off and pull the shirt over his head and that was the whole of getting ready for bed — a nothing, ordinary, unremarked, the kind of exhaustion that isn't sad, just Thursday. He is not sick. He is not hurt. He is a man who worked a long day in a hot room and slept like the dead because his body earned it honestly, and none of that is anywhere you get to keep.

Your hands — his hands — come up in front of your face in the thin curtained light, and you turn them over, nail beds torn, a thin white line across one knuckle from a mandoline slip he still tells the story of when he's had two beers. They don't feel like your hands. They never do, not yet, not for a while.

You say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice with a flatness in it that isn't yours and a drawl that isn't either: "Well, hell."

And you lie there a moment longer, wearing him, with no idea — none, not a guess — how long that's going to be true.