Colm Ferriter

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The delivery van is still ticking as it cools in the driveway, and you are sixty-five in a body that isn't tired enough yet, standing in a kitchen at two in the morning with the light off and the phone bright in your hand. This one is a good body. Athletic, hazel-eyed, gray hair you don't hate in the mirror. It drives fine. It sleeps fine. Its knees don't complain, not yet, not the way the last one's did. There is nothing wrong with him at all, and that is exactly the problem — you have been him for less than a minute of feeling and forty years of knowing, and the forty years is the part that itches. You did not spin again because he failed you. You spun again because he succeeded, and succeeding, after seven hundred and forty-five men, has stopped being a feeling and started being a fact you already know before you check it. The screen is already loaded. Your thumb is already there. Somewhere it is Thursday morning and somewhere it is still Thursday night, and you have never once let that be a reason to wait.

You spin.

—

The path drops out from under you and comes back wrong-footed, and for one stride your weight is a stranger to itself — then it isn't. You are running. Cold air needles a nose that is not the one you had a breath ago, freckled, unbothered by the temperature in a way that says it's used to this. Your earbuds are feeding you a song mid-chorus. A watch on your left wrist buzzes once, low against the bone, a split logged for a step you never took, and you feel the arm it's strapped to before you feel anything else — thicker through the forearm, a tightness of muscle under a long-sleeve running jacket, the right sleeve snug over something raised and inked beneath the fabric that your fingers, if you looked, would not yet be allowed to see. Dawn is doing something gold and cheap to a canal on your left. Breath goes up off you in a column. Two feet, still moving, already yours.

The jacket is the first thing that opens. Not a memory exactly — a temperature, a room, an arm going into a sleeve half-asleep, a zipper dragged up one-handed while the other hand held a phone showing 5:58 and no new messages, the way it hadn't shown a new message in longer than he'd admit to anyone at the shop. Colm Ferriter. The name comes up attached to nothing, then attaches to everything at once — to the smell of a rowhouse kitchen two blocks off this exact path, marble steps out front worn into a shallow dish by a hundred years of other people's feet before his ever touched them. He bought that house for what it was, not what it looked like. He has lived in it alone for six years.

The leggings under the jacket remember themselves too, black, broken in, and with them comes the gym floor smell of a locker room and, underneath that, further down, a woman's laugh he hasn't heard except in his own head in three years — Danielle, who used to run this same stretch with him before the argument that was never really about the running, and who is somewhere in this city right now, awake or not, married or not, he genuinely doesn't know, and some mornings that not-knowing is the whole reason his feet hit the path at this hour instead of a treadmill in a gym with a television.

The right sleeve of the jacket presses along the ink beneath it and gives you more than warmth — gives you a chair in a barracks common room, gives you men's names you have already half-lost, gives you the exact hour he decided, discharged and twenty-six and restless in a way he didn't have a civilian word for yet, that he would put the unit crest on his arm before anything else went on his skin, because he wanted the first mark to be a debt paid, not a decoration. Everything he has tattooed onto other people since — twelve years of it, a shop with his name on the lease, a chair that stays reclined between appointments like a held breath — comes from that decision, though he would never say it that plainly to a client with a needle two inches from their skin.

His body is forty and knows it in specific places — a left knee that clicks on the third mile and not before, a lower back that was fine at thirty and now announces itself on long flights, hands that are steady in a way his eyes have started needing help to be, readers folding in his shop apron more mornings than not. But the legs are good. The wind is good. He runs this canal four times a week whether or not anyone's waiting for him at the other end of it, and nobody has been in a long while, and that's a fact he carries the way he carries the vape in his jacket pocket, which you can feel now, a small hard rectangle riding his hip with every stride — habit, not need, though he'd argue that point with anyone who asked.

The earbud wire against your neck gives up one more thing, small and stupid and entirely him: a pen, God knows why a pen surfaces here, but his hand knows the click of one without being told, top of a Bic worked between two fingers a thousand times over a thousand consult sheets, a tic so old it outlasted two exes and one dead father and it will probably outlast this run too, except there's no pen out here, just his own knuckles doing the ghost of the motion against nothing, thumb finding a click that isn't there.

You look at your hands. Freckled, big-knuckled, a white-gold nothing of a wedding band that isn't one — just a plain ring on the wrong finger for it to mean anything, catching what light there is. They are not clenched. They are running-loose, swinging low the way his memory said they always do by mile four, and for a second you just watch them do it without you.

Then you lift your eyes off them, to the water, to the lit-up bridge going pink at the edges, and you say, out loud, to no one, in his own unhurried voice:

"Okay. Let's see what you're worth, Colm."