Colby Strathan

Earnest Boykin's kitchen smells like burnt coffee and 3-in-1 oil, and you have been him for forty-one seconds when the wanting comes back. It is Friday, early afternoon in Phoenix, sun cutting hard through the blinds onto a counter of unopened mail addressed to a man who is not going to open it, because you are not him, not really, not for longer than it takes. Sixty-five years in these knees. A nose broken once, badly reset. You stood in his garage this morning setting a torque wrench down with his exact tired competence, felt his forty years of knowing a socket by weight alone, and it was fine. It was good, even. But good is not what you spin for. You spin because a body that works is not the same as a body you haven't been yet, and Earnest Boykin has been Earnest Boykin, entirely, for less than a minute, and already that is starting to feel like a long time. You open the laptop on his table. The wheel is already loaded from last night, patient, colorful, indifferent. You do not think about him again. You have never once carried a man forward in your thinking once his card is drawn. You pay. You spin.

The logbook is under your hand and the pen is between two fingers that are not the fingers that picked it up. One line goes down wrong — the "1" of the time-stamp bent backward, a child's mistake — and you stop, and do it again, slow, correct, "11:47," and the next line, and the next, checked, checked, checked, on a task this arm has done ten thousand times without once looking. Fluorescent light off laminate. A lobby smell, floor cleaner and cold coffee. Somewhere behind you, glass doors, and beyond them a parking lot lit sodium-orange because here it is night, deep night, though four hundred miles east it is still afternoon and you are the reason those two facts are both true at once.

The shirt is what gives him to you first. Black poly-blend against your back, damp at the shoulder blades already this early in the shift, and it comes with a whole morning: him standing in the trailer's one bedroom at four in the afternoon, blinds slat-cut with hard blue high-desert light, pulling this same shirt off a wire hanger and over one arm, wincing a little as the sleeve drags over the tattoo — American traditional, an eagle gone soft-edged and faded at the color, needled into him at twenty by a guy in Reno who undercharged him and it shows. He remembers, or you remember for him, that his ex used to trace the wingtip of it with one finger when they lay around on a Sunday, the two of them not talking about the fact that it was ending. Sarah. Not Sarah's name, exactly — the memory won't hand over the name clean, only the shape of missing her, a low-grade ache like a tooth you've stopped poking at on purpose.

The belt gives you more: keys, radio, flashlight, the little rehearsed weight of them settling on his hips the way they do every night at the start of shift, a ritual he stopped noticing around month three. His hands know this belt in the dark. His hands know a lot of things in the dark — the third stair that creaks in the lobby, the exact pressure to open the side door without the alarm chirping, the particular boredom of two a.m. that isn't loneliness exactly, just space with nothing put in it. He likes the space, mostly. He does his rounds. He vapes out back by the dumpster where the cameras don't quite reach, some fruit flavor he'd be embarrassed to name if anyone asked. He has never told anyone here that he's from a trailer up past the truck stop, sagebrush to the step, and that some nights he sits out on the cinderblock stoop after work with the sky doing something enormous over him and thinks, without being religious about it exactly, that there might be something arranging all this. He doesn't say that out loud. He cracks his knuckles instead, one hand then the other, a habit older than he can trace, and that's what your hands are doing right now without you, working through the first knuckle before you even notice you've started.

Boots on tile. Twenty-four years old in this body, and it carries itself lighter than Earnest's did, less argument in the joints, a small silver hoop cold against the left earlobe when you turn your head toward the doors. Nothing hurts. That itself is almost strange after four hundred and seventy-two other weights. You feel the haircut before you see it — that hard line at the temple where long meets short, no blend, something he pays nine dollars for at a place near the gas station and privately likes more than he'd admit.

You look down at the logbook, at the pen still upright in your grip, at ink drying in a hand this steady.

You look up, past the lamp, out through the glass toward a parking lot lit orange against a black desert sky, and you say, to nobody, in a voice with a little more Nevada flatness in it than the one you had an hour and four hundred miles ago:

"Didn't even feel that one."