Colton Ashworth

You are standing in Miguel Olveda's kitchen in the gray Seattle dark, sixteen minutes into being him, and his knees already ache from a night shift that ended four hours ago. His hands — small, careful hands that know how to find a vein in the dark without waking anyone — are wrapped around a mug of coffee he does not want. You made him this far and it is not enough. It was never going to be enough. Sixteen minutes of a good, tired, decent man standing in his own clean kitchen while the rain starts, and already the itch is back under the borrowed skin, the one that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with you. Boredom is too small a word. It is more like hunger that has learned to wear a schedule. You set the mug down with his hand, feel the small click of his knuckles as you flex them out of habit that isn't yours, and you go to the site instead of back to bed.

The wheel turns and there is no falling, no travel, just the seam between one body and the next closing behind you like a door you didn't hear open.

You are on your side in the dark, and the dark is a different dark — daylight trying to get through a blind somewhere behind you, cut thin, the kind of light that means the day already started without this room. A phone six inches from a face that isn't looking through your eyes yet, thumb slowed on the glass. Then it isn't slow. Your thumb — his thumb — moves fast and sure through a scroll he'd stopped in the middle of, some photo of a woman he used to know tagged at somebody else's wedding, and the face holding still over the screen stops blinking on the beat a face usually blinks on. The blue light sits on one cheek. Nobody in the room notices, because there is nobody else in the room.

You feel him arrive the way you always do — not as him, never as him, but as the objects that were already touching you when the wheel stopped spinning. The phone case first: rubberized, a hairline crack along one corner, and with it a flash — him dropping it on concrete outside a walk-in freezer, laughing, another cook catching it before it hit again. Then the sheet under your — his — bare leg, worn soft from washing, and with it comes the sound of a window unit AC straining somewhere close, the smell of a room that's been shut up too long against a Texas morning that's already ninety degrees at ten a.m. He works nights. Of course he does. The line doesn't run breakfast, it runs dinner service into the black hours, and this is what his Saturday looks like: asleep — trying to sleep — through the brightest, hottest part of the day, blinds taped at the edges because the landlord never fixed the blackout ones, phone in hand because the body won't actually let itself rest, not fully, not since the divorce.

The mattress under you gives that memory next, worn to the shape of one person now instead of two. It comes in bigger than the others — a whole year, unspooling. Sarah on the other side of this same bed, before it learned to hold only him. Her laugh from the kitchen while he stood at this same stove that isn't in this room, teaching her to sear a steak and getting flour on her cheek on purpose. The trailer they'd rented outside town, the water tower visible from the yard if you stood on the truck bed, barbed wire along the property line that he mowed around every May and cursed every May. The wedding — September the twelfth, the date is on his calf right now under the sheet, permanent, hers won't come off no matter what came after — and then, quieter, sadder, the year it stopped working, nobody's fault the way everybody said, and one morning taking the ring off in this exact bathroom and setting it on the sink edge and not putting it back on, ever, so that now there's just a pale stripe of skin where gold used to sit, and his hand still goes looking for it sometimes at 3 a.m. on the line when he's stressed, finds nothing, and has to remember all over again.

The shirt is the last thing, and it gives you the most ordinary memory of all, which is somehow the one that lands hardest: him pulling this same navy tee off a hanger yesterday morning before his shift, arm through one sleeve, the other sleeve catching on the eyebrow barbell when he ran a hand through his hair without thinking, a small private curse, dimples showing even though nobody was there to see them, because they show at rest, they always have, since he was a kid and his mother said God gave him those so people would forgive him things. His back twinges when you — he — roll half an inch on the mattress, an old line-cook ache low in the spine from ten years of standing on concrete over a flat-top, a body that is thirty-two going on fifty in the joints and doesn't know any other way to be. His hands know things without being asked: the particular give of a knife through onion, the two-second count before you flip something that's about to burn. Right now those hands are only cracking their own knuckles, one by one, thumb still hovering the phone, a tic so old it isn't even a decision anymore.

You lie there another second in all of it — the ache, the heat, the woman who isn't coming back, the ring that isn't there, the name on his leg he'll never have lasered off no matter who tells him to — and something in you, the something that came here bored and greedy and unwilling to say which, goes very quiet and very interested at the same time.

You look at your hand. Turn it over. The tan line catches the blue phone-light like it's trying to tell you something you already know.

"Didn't figure you for a Saturday sleeper," you say to the empty room, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's true either.