Colton Weatherall

The knife is still in your hand when you decide.

You are Danny Wysocki — five minutes now, a body borrowed last spin, standing at a steel table in a walk-in that smells like cold blood and bleach. The apron straps cut into shoulders that aren't yours to keep, not really, and there's a beauty mark under the left eye you keep catching in the reflection off the hanging scale, and you think: no. Not this one. Twenty years old and already smelling like a cooler for the rest of his life. You want out of him the way you want out of a coat that fits wrong in the arms. Five minutes was enough. You set the knife down clean, the way he would, because some decency in you still does that much, and you go back to the site on your phone with his own thumb.

vessel.cards. The wheel spinning under your borrowed hand for the 311th time.

It lands, and there is no gap between the landing and the next breath.

The breath goes even. Ragged, then even, in the space of one exhale, and the arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up on its own, and the whole body rolls onto its back like it has done this every night of its life, though it hasn't, not once — hands folding at the chest like a man laid out for a viewing. Sun instead of streetlight now, coming hard through the gap in heavy curtains, because where he is it's the middle of a Sunday, and where you just were it was also the middle of a Sunday, two clocks agreeing on the hour and disagreeing about everything the hour means. He works nights. Somewhere out past those curtains a water tower is holding the heat of an 11 a.m. sun over a gravel road, and he is supposed to be dead to the world until three.

The shirt is the first thing. Gray, thin from washing, and it gives up a morning before this one — him pulling it over his head in a locker room that smelled like diesel and coffee, some other guy singing badly two lockers down, the Station 14 patch on the navy one folded in his bag for tomorrow's shift, this gray one just the one he grabbed to sleep in because it was on top. There's a whole year folded into that thin cotton: the academy, puking behind a rig on a hundred-and-four-degree burn day, a captain who called him "Blondie" for eight months until he earned something else. Pride comes up through the shirt like heat off asphalt — not loud, just there, solid, the way a man feels about work he's good at and didn't expect to be.

The mattress under his back is a motel bed, and that comes through the sheets — this is a road call, a wildfire mutual-aid deployment two counties over, bunking here because the station's full up with borrowed engines. Boots by the door, still ashy. A phone face-down on the nightstand with a girl's name on the lock screen — Carly — and the memory that comes with her is soft and a little worried: she doesn't love the nights, doesn't love the smoke smell that doesn't wash out of the truck, loves him anyway, badly enough that it scares them both a little. No ring. Not yet. Maybe.

The tattoo on the hand comes up when the fingers curl against the sheet — the unit insignia, and under it a name he doesn't say out loud much, a cousin who didn't come home from a deployment, and the neck one is the same story finished in different ink. He got both before the fire academy, before Carly, in a shop that smelled like rubbing alcohol, and he cried a little in the chair and told the artist it was just the pain, and it wasn't, and everyone in the room knew it.

He is twenty-three and his lower back complains a little from three years of turnout gear and stairs, and his forearms know the weight of a hose line the way a hand knows a doorknob, without thinking, and there's a callus on the pad of his right thumb from a Halligan bar. A pack of cigarettes waits in his jacket for after the shift, half-empty, a habit he doesn't talk about at the firehouse table even though everyone already knows. In the hole on paper — a truck he's still paying for, a card he doesn't look at the statement on — but none of that touches him lying here, unconscious of all of it, folded hands, even breath, borrowed peace.

Then the eyes open.

You look at the hand first — the tattooed one, knuckles, the small crossed insignia — and turn it over slow in the motel light, and it is not the hand you had five minutes ago, not the one with the beauty mark and the knife-callus, and something in your chest that isn't your chest at all does something like relief.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, to the water tower you can't see yet through the curtain gap. "Okay. Let's see what you've got, Colton."