Cole Brennaman

The cleaver goes back on the magnet strip with a click that means the shift is over, and Travis Kolbeck's forearm aches the way it always aches at this hour, that deep bone-tired throb that no amount of stretching fixes because you did this to him five hundred and forty-six times already and never once let him rest properly between. It is the middle of the night in Phoenix, everyone in the house asleep except you, and Travis is not really Travis anymore in any way that matters — he is a lazy eye and a good forearm and thirty-two years of somebody else's marriage you never bothered to learn the shape of, because you were only ever passing through him, the way you pass through all of them. You stand at the counter in his kitchen with the fluorescent light buzzing and you feel the specific boredom that has nothing to do with tiredness — a hunger with no object yet, the itch that always comes right around the six-hundred-mark since the last one, though you've stopped counting in round numbers and started counting in this: how long since something in your chest lifted. It has been weeks in this one. Weeks of good hands and a dull marriage and meat. You go to the site on his phone, the way you always do, thumb moving with a fluency Travis himself never had, and the wheel is already loaded, spinning before you've fully decided, because deciding and doing collapsed into the same motion a long time ago.

The wheel lands. There is no sensation of travel, no falling, no tunnel — only the fact of a different hour, a different weight, a phone six inches from a face that is not asking permission to be a face.

The thumb that was slowing down speeds up. It flicks past a meme, past a girl's laugh caught mid-video, past a text thread going gray from waiting, all things this body's owner had stopped on and you have no patience for. The room is dark except for the blue rectangle. You are lying on your side. Your shoulder is thin under you in a way that surprises whatever is left of expectation — no meat on it, no weight, just a long skinny frame gone loose with sleep-that-isn't-sleep, because somewhere behind the eyes you're wearing it is actually late morning, and this body should not be lying down at all. The mattress is thin. Somewhere past the doorway a window unit is fighting a losing fight against Houston in whatever month this is, and losing audibly.

It comes in through the phone first — the glass under your thumb still warm from a hand that had been scrolling for forty minutes trying not to think, and what it doesn't want to think about arrives anyway: a girl, dark-haired, laughing at something on a beach two months ago, and underneath that laugh a specific ache, recent, raw at the edges — Danielle, and the last text she sent him, which he has reread more times than he would ever admit, something short and final that he keeps rereading like rereading might change the tense of it. That's the ex. That's the one who still matters. You feel the loneliness of it land in a chest built differently than any you've worn in months, narrow ribs, a heartbeat that runs a little fast even at rest, and something underneath the sadness that isn't sadness at all — restlessness, a mind that keeps hopping rails even in the dark, even half-asleep, thoughts arriving before the last one's finished. ADHD, some doctor told him two years ago like it explained something, and it did and it didn't.

The shirt against your back opens more: a morning, not today, an ordinary one — pulling this exact gray T-shirt over his head half-awake while Marisol was still asleep in the same bed, careful not to jostle her, the overalls hanging on the closet door where he'd left them the night before crusted with yesterday's grout, the smell of them already in the room, cotton and old pipe-dope and the specific mildew of other people's bathrooms. He'd stood there a second too long just looking at her sleeping, feeling something steady and unglamorous that he didn't have a better word for than home, before the alarm made him move. That's who he lives with. Not a marriage. Something quieter than that, still finding its shape.

His hands know things without asking — you feel it in the fingers even doing nothing, the phantom memory of a wrench's weight, muscle that has learned exactly how much pressure a rusted nut wants before it either gives or shears, calluses along both palms that have nothing to do with a gym and everything to do with kneeling on cracked tile under strangers' sinks since he was seventeen. He is skinny in a way that looks unfinished but isn't — eighteen and lean the way boys are lean before they fill out, wiry through the forearms from real use rather than the gym mirror kind. Under the fringe cut straight across his forehead, freckles are scattered over a nose that's slightly sunburned along the bridge, a summer's worth of driving between job sites with the window down. Faith is a loose, private thing in him, something he'd call spiritual if pressed and never explain further. He doesn't drink alone. He never smoked, tried once at sixteen and hated it. None of that arrives as fact — it arrives as feeling, warm and unexamined, the way a person knows their own habits without narrating them.

And there is money somewhere in this — an inheritance, or a settlement, something outsized and slightly embarrassing that sits in an account he doesn't touch, that he never mentions to the guys on his crew, that makes Marisol tease him sometimes about still wearing the same three shirts. You feel the private pleasure of that secret arrive and pass through you like something borrowed rather than earned, because it was never yours to have.

The thumb has stopped scrolling. You lie there a moment in the last of the dark, in a chest smaller than any you've filled in a long time, in a night that is actually somebody's forgotten late morning, feeling how thin he is compared to the last one, how much faster his pulse runs, how his knuckles want cracking the second you notice them at all.

You bring your hand up in front of your face. Long fingers, nicked at one knuckle, a burn scar you don't have because there isn't one — just skin, freckled to the wrist, unfamiliar in its lightness. You turn it over once, like checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in a voice higher and younger than any you've used in months. "Okay."