Colton Vandermark

Walter Prussick's kitchen smells like coffee he hasn't earned yet, and you stand in it wearing his short, athletic frame, his silver hair still flattened on one side from a pillow you didn't choose. Less than a minute in him. His knees already ache in the way old knees ache before weather. You flex his hand, the one you'll use in an hour at a lathe you've never touched, and you think: this one works fine. That isn't the problem. The problem is that it's Friday, before light, and something in you — some restlessness that outlasted sixteen other men — wants to know what it feels like to be new again, to not have joints that announce themselves. You didn't come back because Walter failed you. You came back because he succeeded, completely, and that turned out to be its own kind of nothing. You open the laptop on his counter, the wheel already loaded from last night, cursor blinking over the coffee ring. You spin it the way you've spun it sixteen times before, like paying a toll, and Walter Prussick's kitchen, his knees, his whole finished life, drops away from you mid-breath.

The breath that finishes is not his. It goes ragged, then even, one long exhale that isn't Walter's tight old lungs but something looser, younger, deeper in the chest. The arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up without you deciding to draw it. The body rolls onto its back. Hands fold at the chest, a posture this man has apparently never once slept in, because something in the muscle resists it a half-second before giving in. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtain like a blade laid across the ceiling. You are eighteen years old and you do not know it yet, only that the ache in the knees is gone and there's a new ache instead, low in the shoulder, machinist's shoulder, and it's morning here in a way it wasn't morning where you were.

You lie still and let the room tell you what it can before anything else does. Dry heat already pressing at the glass even before sunrise. A courtyard smell — chlorine from a pool nobody swims in, dust off a palm frond, somebody's cigarette from two balconies over. The sheets under you are cheap and soft with washing. Your own bare foot finds the cool seam of the fitted sheet and that alone gives you a flicker: laundromat, quarters, a boyfriend's hand in the dryer's lint trap laughing about something. Gone before it finishes.

You sit up, and the t-shirt against your back is the real key, worn thin at the shoulder blades, and it opens like a door left on the latch. Getting dressed yesterday morning — no, the morning before a night shift, always disorienting, the sun coming up as he was going down — pulling this exact shirt over his head in a bathroom with a cracked mirror, humming without meaning to, dipping two fingers into a tin before he remembered his boyfriend hated the smell and putting it back, deciding on gum instead, deciding against it, doing it anyway once he was in the truck alone. The tin lives in these sweatpants pocket, you realize, your hip against it. Chew, not dip, on the good days when someone might get close to his mouth.

More comes with the mattress against your palms — this exact bed, a mattress bought secondhand off a guy from work, moved in with a boyfriend's help six months back, the boyfriend who is not the one your chest remembers hardest. That one is the ex. Recent. A name that surfaces with the smell of a different apartment, a fight about nothing that was actually about everything, a goodbye in a parking lot that didn't feel like a goodbye until it was one. The current boyfriend is steadier, kinder, texts good morning even though your shifts never line up, and something in the sternum eases at the thought of him the way it never eased for the ex, and some other part of the sternum, dishonest, misses the ex anyway.

Your hands — his hands — know things without asking permission. They know the weight of a chuck key, the particular give of a collet before it locks, the way to hold a micrometer so your own pulse doesn't throw the reading off by a thousandth. They know steel chips are hot enough to brand you through a glove if you're careless, and there's a thin white mark of an old burn on the inside of one wrist that these facts don't call a scar but the body remembers as one anyway, privately, in feeling rather than form. Eighteen and already good with his hands in a way that makes his father — Catholic, quiet about it, prouder than he says — call him a tradesman like it's a blessing recovered from a family that lost the habit of them.

The anxiety sits low and familiar, not loud this morning, medicated into something manageable, a hum instead of a siren. His hand — your hand now — drifts up toward his own face without either of you deciding it, fingertips grazing his jaw, and that gesture alone unlocks a whole reel: nervous tic through a bad year, a therapist's office with a white-noise machine outside the door, learning to notice the hand before it noticed his face for him.

You look down. Your hands. Younger hands than you've worn in seventeen spins, unmarked, a little rough at the base of the fingers, warm from someone else's sleep. You turn one over slowly, like checking it for a wound that never comes, and the streetlight catches the calluses at the pads.

You lift your eyes to nothing in particular, to the gap in the curtain, and say, out loud, into the empty apartment: "Okay. Not bad."