Colin Presnell

The felt under Wendell Ratliff's forearms is worn smooth in two ovals where a thousand mornings of somebody else's elbows rested before yours ever did. You are behind the table at ten minutes to shift, the pit lights not up yet, and you click the edge of a chip against the rail because his hands want something to do and there is nothing to deal. Fifty-six years old, gray hair combed the way a man combs it when he stopped caring what it looked like and started caring that it looked the same every day. You have been him for five minutes. It should be enough. It is not.

You know exactly what sent you back, because you carried it here from the body before this one: Reynaldo Cabezas, thirty-eight minutes a stranger to himself, and you in him the whole short weight of it, down in a hole in Ohio smelling coal dust and Icy Hot, his knees singing, his wife's voice on a phone he didn't answer. Twenty-eight minutes wearing a marriage that wasn't yours and a body that ached in ways this new one, Wendell's, does not. You left Reynaldo for Wendell because Wendell seemed like rest. But rest, it turns out, is its own kind of nothing, and nothing is the one thing you cannot spend a life doing, even somebody else's life, even for five minutes. So you get up from the felt, walk to the break room, and on your phone — his phone, his thumbprint that still somehow reads as yours — you open vessel.cards again.

You spin without deciding to, the way you always do, the way that is itself the decision.

The room comes up cold-white and cheap-tiled, and there is warm water running somewhere below the wrist, and a razor is already moving — not stopping, never stopping, gliding up along a jaw with a boy's confidence in a man's economy of motion, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth where a beat ago somebody hesitated every single day of his life. The overhead bulb hums. Steam ghosts the mirror at the edges. Your reflection has curly blond hair damp at the roots, green eyes, and shaving foam smeared thin down one side of a face with dimples cut into it even now, holding still, doing nothing, giving nothing away and yet there.

The razor finishes the last stroke. Sets down against porcelain with a small clean sound.

And then it comes, not all at once, the way they told you it would after the first time you didn't believe it and the second time you did.

The razor handle is warm from his palm and it opens like a door: this exact razor, a birthday gift, a card that said *don't cut yourself, idiot* in handwriting round as a kid's. Sara's handwriting. Sara who is asleep down the hall right now in a bed that is his too, dark hair loose on the pillow, an arm that will reach for the space he left when she half-wakes and doesn't find him, because he never sleeps past four without waking once from habit, an old habit, an old job — soot-timed mornings, chimneys wanting to be swept before a house wakes up around them.

The sink under your palms — his palms — is cold and chipped at the drain, and touching it gives you the whole bathroom at once: white subway tile going gray with steam, a shower curtain he's meant to bleach for two months, a bar of soap worn into a thin curved wafer the shape of his thumb. You are standing here because it is the only quiet hour, the hour before the trucks and the ladders and another man's roof, and Colin Presnell has always liked the quiet hour, likes it more than he'd admit to anyone with a face on, alone with the bulb's hum and the drip he keeps forgetting to mention to the landlord.

The jacket on the hook behind the door — you haven't put it on yet, but your fingers know its weight already through the doorframe glance you gave it walking in, canvas gone soft-black with soot ground so deep into the fibers no wash ever lifts it fully, gloves stiff in the pockets like they're still gripping something. Every morning: jacket over the tee, collar up, gloves last because gloves are always last, a small ritual nobody taught him, he just does it, the way his hands do things without asking him first.

And the arm. God, the arm — your right forearm against the cool edge of the sink, ink dark and old enough to have softened at its lines: *Eleanor. Jasper. May 12, 2018.* The date arrives heaviest of anything in the room, heavier than the razor, heavier than Sara sleeping. Eleanor was his mother. Jasper his brother, four years gone by the time the sleeve went on, and May 12 the day of the funeral he didn't cry at until the ride home, alone in the truck, hazards on in a Rite Aid parking lot for eleven minutes he never told anyone about. Nobody at work knows why he doesn't drink more than a few times a year. Nobody needs to. It isn't a thing he brings up. It sits on his arm instead, permanent, plainspoken, doing the missing for him so he doesn't have to say it out loud over coffee.

Twenty-eight and skinny under the jacket's bulk, wrists thin, a body that climbs ladders like it weighs nothing because it mostly doesn't, dimples showing even now with his face doing nothing at all, an inheritance from a father he barely mentions. Sara loves the dimples. Says so more than he thinks she means to. He hasn't told her he loves her back in those exact words yet, not because he doesn't, because the words feel too small next to how big it actually is, and some things you don't say until you're sure the saying won't shrink them.

The bulb hums on. The water still runs, wasteful, warm, headed for the drain.

You lift your right hand — his hand — off the sink's edge and turn it over in the bad yellow light, foam still ghosting one knuckle, ink running dark and elegant across skin that has climbed forty roofs this year alone. You look up into the mirror, into green eyes that are yours now the way none of the last three men's eyes ever quite were, dimples sitting easy in a face gone still and a little amazed at itself.

"Didn't know I had it in me," you say to the glass, and you don't shut the water off yet.