Colby Streeter

Twelve minutes is nothing. That's the trouble with Arturo — the body is long and thin and tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. Standing in his kitchen in Philadelphia, mid-morning light coming flat through the blinds, you feel the old knees complain just holding still. Sixty-four years of somebody else's aches, and you only just got here. There's a mug of his coffee going cold on the counter, and the taste of it, when you tried it, was bitter and grey like everything else about him. Twelve minutes was enough to know: nothing in this one wants to be touched, held, worn longer than a coat you're already sick of. So you go back to the site on his phone, thumb print already loaded from some errand of his you didn't ask about, and you spin, and you feel it click over — not guilt, not exactly, just the itch of somebody else's life going stale in your hands before it's even yours.

The wheel spins somewhere you can't see and lands two thousand miles southwest and five hours earlier, in the dark.

You arrive already leaning, already reaching — the body's hand halfway to a barcode scanner clipped at the wrist, the motion caught wrong, thumb catching air instead of the trigger. You correct it. Slow, deliberate, like a man relearning his own arm. The aisle is high steel racking on both sides, cardboard breathing out its smell of dust and tape, a forklift beeping somewhere behind a wall you can't see. Your — his — body is heavier than Arturo's, packed dense through the shoulders and gut, shorter, warmer, humming with a low current of good health that after twelve minutes of an old man's joints feels almost obscene. You scan the next box. And the one after. Careful. Checked. Ten in a row done like a man doing math instead of muscle memory, because right now it is math — you are borrowing hands that know this job better than you ever will.

The vest is the first thing that talks to you. Orange, reflective tape gone dull with wear, a little stiff at the shoulder seams from sweat dried a hundred times over. You feel — not remember exactly, feel — the first morning he put it on, eighteen years old, too big in the shoulders then, the manager laughing that he'd grow into it. He did. The polo underneath, NASRICO CORPORATE stitched small over the heart, carries the memory of laundry day, a apartment with one working dryer, folding it warm off the machine at midnight because the morning shift starts at four and there's no time to do it then.

The tattoo on the right forearm burns up through the skin like something remembered by the arm itself rather than the mind — Aiden, 10.05.00, cursive, and underneath the letters a mother's kitchen, a woman crying at a table with a phone in her hand, a brother he hasn't said the name of out loud in company since. You don't get the whole story, just the shape of it: a brother gone before either of them got old enough to fix whatever went wrong between them, and the date is the day he was born, not the day he died, because some part of him decided the tattoo should be about the good one.

The eyebrow barbell is a smaller thing, cold under a fingertip when you happen to brush it adjusting your face without meaning to — nineteen, a shop above a taquería, a man he liked who did the piercing and didn't call after, and the way it still catches when he frowns, a small permanent flinch he stopped noticing years ago.

The boots on the concrete know this floor by weight and echo — six years of the same forty yards back and forth, back and forth, the water tower out past the loading door standing in the exact same place it stood yesterday and the day before that, gray against a sky just starting to go pink at the rim. He clocked in at three like always. Nobody else in this county is awake but truckers and the night-shift skeleton crew and him, and there's a particular loneliness to it he doesn't examine, just carries, like the vest.

His hands know how to click the scanner's trigger without a thought, how to walk the aisle without looking at his feet, how to check a barcode against a manifest half-asleep. What they do when there's nothing else to do — no scanner, no box — is click a pen, over and over, a tic from some job before this one, or from church as a kid, kneeling in a pew with a bulletin and a ballpoint, waiting for a Mass he only half believed to end. Catholic in the bones more than the practice now — Sunday sometimes, guilt always. Single, and lonely in the specific way of a gay man in a county where the nearest bar worth driving to is forty minutes and mostly empty on a Tuesday. A big night once or twice a month, just to remember what his own laugh sounds like around other people. No cigarettes, ever — his mother's lungs took the choice out of it for him early.

The body itself: twenty-three, thick through the middle in a way that's strength as much as softness, freckles dense across the nose like a spray of rust, platinum-silver hair curling loose on top from a dye job he does himself in the bathroom sink every six weeks. Nothing hurts. That's the whole gift of him — nothing hurts, not yet, not in a body this young, and after Arturo's knees it feels like standing in water after a long walk uphill.

You look down at your hand — his hand — freckled, tattooed, a pen not even in it and still the fingers twitch for one. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, and it is; it's the only real thing in the aisle at this hour.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the water tower through the open bay door, to the forklift still beeping somewhere out of sight. "Let's see what you got."