Colby Straathof

Raymond Sobczak's recliner smells like menthol rub and old coffee, and the television is showing a rerun neither of you asked for. You have been him less than a minute and already you know the whole shape of the rest of his day: the mail at two, the small pill organizer with SUN through SAT, the neighbor who talks too long about her sprinklers. Nothing hurts, which after twenty-nine other men in twenty-nine other kinds of pain feels less like relief than like standing in a museum of a life already finished. Your finger is still on the trackpad. The wheel is still spinning on the laptop screen, throwing colored light across Raymond's spotted hand, and you don't wait for it to land soft. You are already gone before it stops.

The room tips. Gray Miami light replaced by a thin gray Seattle one, a hard seam of it cutting through a gap in the curtains. Your face is in a pillow that smells like somebody else's sleep. An arm you don't own yet is hanging off the edge of the mattress, fingers loose over a heap of sheet on the floor, and you feel — before you understand it — the body deciding to breathe slower, deeper, drawing that arm up and folding both hands on the chest like a man laid out for a viewing. Skinny ribs. Long legs still tangled in cheap cotton sheets. Freckles you can't see yet but can already feel, a kind of texture on your own face that Raymond never had.

The hands are the first thing. Thin wrists, a toothpick groove worn into one back tooth from a habit that isn't a habit anymore because there's no toothpick in this bed, and the mouth works anyway, out of memory, chewing air. A callus at the base of each finger, rope-textured, and just from that alone something comes up out of nowhere — gripping the handle on the back step of the truck, Marcus laughing up ahead of him at some joke about the Kraken losing again, cold gusting up under the coveralls at six in the morning, that particular full-body ache of holding on while the truck lurches through a pothole on Denny.

The sheets under you next — cheap, soft with age, washed a hundred times — and a whole winter comes with them: him and Jordan tangled up in this exact bed on a night they both had off, the space heater ticking in the corner because the building's radiator never worked right, Jordan's laugh right up against his ear, the specific happiness of being wanted by someone who never once made him feel like the mullet or the freckles or the Bible verses his mom still texted him were something to apologize for. Under that, quieter, sourer: Tyler. The ex. His voice on the phone eight months ago saying he needed space to figure some things out, and the two years before that folding down small and hard like something in a fist. You feel it pass through him and out, the way real grief does when it's mostly healed.

The curtain, when your eyes finally track to it, gives you nothing — just gray light, a street two floors down starting to wake up wrong side of noon for him, because last night's shift ran till four and the truck doesn't care what day the calendar says it is. Monday for you both, two different Mondays.

Then the shirt from yesterday, slung over the chair where he can almost smell it — the coveralls' inside collar, orange dye and diesel and the particular grime of hauling forty cans a block for eight hours — and with it, faster than thought, the whole ritual of getting into it: left arm first always, right boot always tied twice because the laces are cheap, a toothpick tucked behind the ear before the gloves go on, a habit so old it isn't even a decision anymore. His body remembers being twenty-six and skinny and strong in the specific ways the job made him strong — forearms, low back, grip — and remembers being tired in the ways it made him tired, too, a permanent low ache between the shoulder blades that isn't pain exactly, just cost.

You lie there a second longer, hands still folded on his chest in a posture no photograph of him would ever show, feeling how young this one is under your borrowed weight, how little of value he has that anyone could put a number on, how sure he was, an hour ago in his own head, that none of that mattered because Jordan was coming by Thursday.

You lift the hands off the chest. Turn one over in the gray light, freckled knuckles, a thin white scar of a callus and nothing else — no ring, no ink, nothing his mother would call a mark against him. You look at it like it belongs to somebody you haven't met yet, because in a way it does.

"Sorry, man," you say, to the empty apartment, to nobody, and you don't know yet if you mean it or if it's just a thing this mouth wants to say.