Colton Mabry

The apartment is the same dull gray it's been every night this month. Nothing on. Thumb dragging down a feed already seen twice. You've had this thing in you for years — the itch, the want to know what it's like on the other side of a face, any face, someone else's weight in your own chest — and you have never once been able to pay for it, because nobody sells it, because it isn't real. Except tonight there's a link somebody dropped into a thread you shouldn't have been reading, and the link goes to a page called vessel.cards, and the page has a wheel on it, plain as a raffle, and underneath the wheel it says *pay, spin, become.* You have laughed at dumber things and paid for worse. You put the card number in before you can talk yourself out of it. You spin.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no countdown. There is a stockroom under fluorescent light, cold enough to fog, and a case of canned corn in your hands, and your own arm already lowering it wrong onto a shelf — a half-second of a motion done badly, corrected, done again slow and deliberate, like a man checking his own work for the first time in years. Your body is not your body. It is five-ten and it is young and it is tired in a way that has nothing to do with age. Night air conditioning roars somewhere behind a wall. It's the middle of his shift, though outside it should be afternoon — and that wrongness sits there a second, unexplained, because his clock and yours were never going to match.

The apron strap is what gives you the first of it — canvas, a little frayed at the buckle, and through it comes a flash of a break room, a time clock, a manager saying *you're closing alone again, that's fine right?* and Colton's own tired *yeah, it's fine* going out into air that didn't want it answered. Overnight stock. Six nights a week at the gas-and-grocery off the highway, because the community college classes run in daylight and somebody has to keep the lights on for both. He does the numbers in his head sometimes standing right here — tuition against hours against the truck payment — and the numbers are always a little short, and he has stopped minding it the way he used to.

The cans are cold through his gloves and the cold is real, is his, his hands already knowing the stacking pattern without needing to be told, three across, two up, label facing out, ten thousand times worn into muscle until it does itself. You feel how strong this body is under the tiredness — shoulders built from exactly this kind of lifting, not from anything he chose on purpose, just work finding a shape and keeping it. There's an ache low in the back that isn't injury, just hours, just standing.

The hoodie comes next, gray, soft at the cuffs from washing, and it gives you a whole morning: him pulling it on in a trailer bedroom with the window unit rattling, jeans already on, the backpack by the door with a laptop that cost him a summer of overtime, the walk out past the barbed wire fence to where his truck sits on the gravel, the water tower standing up out of the flat like it's the only thing tall for miles. He'd texted her before he left — *Marisol* comes with the name already warm — something dumb and small, a photo of the dashboard sunrise, her sending back a heart because she was already awake doing her own long day somewhere else. Dating eight months now. Church on Sundays when the shift lets him, his mother's rosary still in the truck's glovebox though he doesn't use it much, just likes it there. Nicotine pouch tucked in his lip right now, mint gone flat, a habit he picked up from a coworker and kept because the alternative was smoking and his dad's lungs taught him not to want that.

None of it is dramatic. That's what lands hardest — a decent kid, broke in the ordinary way, loved in the ordinary way, doing a job nobody envies so he can sit under a different sun some other day with a laptop and a future he's still building one gravel-road morning at a time. You feel how much he does not hate his life. You feel, with his own quiet unbothered feeling and not yours, how little he'd trade it for.

You set the last can on the shelf. You look down at the gloves, then peel one back and look at the hand itself — a hand that knows how to stack corn without watching and does not know anything else has happened to it. You lift your eyes toward the stockroom's flickering light like it's a lens.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, out loud, to nobody, and you don't know yet if that's true for tomorrow too.