Colton Weesner

You are standing in Rolando's break room in a scrub top that still smells like somebody else's hospital, and you have been him for forty seconds, and it is already wrong in the way it is always wrong — not the body, the body is fine, athletic and quick and only forty-five, but the *smallness* of it, the shift ahead of him, the same charts, the same names of dying strangers you'll learn only to forget. You did not spin for a reason you could defend out loud. You spun because the vending machine hummed and the clock said eleven fifty-eight and there is a particular kind of hunger that has nothing to do with need. Twenty-five years of him, easy — never mind he's real, never mind somewhere a Rolando who is not you is now simply gone, folded up and erased with no seam showing. You've stopped letting yourself think about that part. You take out the phone that is not your phone, open the tab that is always open, and let his thumb — no, your thumb now — tap the wheel.

It spins through faces you'll never meet twice.

It lands.

The kitchen arrives around you before you do: fluorescent tube light gone amber through a cheap lampshade, a coffee maker with a crust in its carafe, linoleum cold enough to feel through boot leather even though you are not moving your feet yet, because they are not your feet, they are his, mid-shift in their stillness, weight settled back on the heels the way a tired man stands. The phone is already turning over in his hand — face-down against the counter — and his arm lets it go. You feel that letting-go before you feel anything else: a small, total defeat, the hand opening because the mind told it there was no point holding on to a screen full of things it will never own.

Then the rest of him comes in through what he's touching, the way it always does — not given, found.

The hoodie zip under your — his — fingers: cheap teeth, cold metal, a smell of engine and cedar chips he keeps in the cab for the smell alone. That brings the morning back first, hours ago by his clock, dark yet, always dark when he dresses: the gray thermal pulled over his head in the cramped sleeper, elbows knocking the low ceiling, a ritual so old his arms do it without waking the rest of him up. The flannel goes on over it because the cab runs cold before the engine's warm, sleeves rolled twice because they're a half-inch long in the arm, always have been, since the store never carries his size in the cut he likes. Jeans stiff at the knee from yesterday's diesel splash he never quite scrubbed. Boots that already know the shape of his feet better than any woman ever has — the left one broken in wrong from a clutch pedal worn soft years ago on a truck he doesn't drive anymore.

The counter under your palm: Formica, sticky in one corner from a spill he keeps meaning to wipe. That's this kitchen — his mother's kitchen, technically, the house he grew up in and never quite left, rent free in exchange for keeping the water heater from dying — and through the counter comes a whole evening: coming off ten hours behind the wheel with his back locked at the base, standing here because sitting felt worse, scrolling because scrolling asks nothing of a body this tired. The watch on the screen had cost more than his last two paychecks combined. He didn't want the watch. He wanted the version of his life where the number under it didn't matter, where Danielle — her name comes with a warmth like a struck match, quick and real — could see him buy something without doing math first. She's asleep two hours from here, or awake, waiting on a text he was too proud to send once he saw the price and felt smaller for looking.

The goatee under your — his — own fingers when they drift up without asking: familiar wire of it, trimmed two nights ago in a truck-stop bathroom mirror with a disposable razor and no light worth the name. Twenty-four years in a body that has never once been anywhere but Texas, gravel roads and a water tower he can see from the truck stop like a compass point, a body that knows how to back a sixty-three-foot trailer into a dock in the dark by feel, that knows dip tucked back-left because a molar's tender on the right, that carries no scars because nothing has happened to it yet worth marking — just wear, sun on the forearms, a callus map only his own hand would recognize.

None of it is dramatic. That's what gets you, every time, in the last half-second before it's fully yours: how much of a whole life is just this — cold linoleum, a phone turned face-down, a woman's name that warms something in the chest, a shirt sleeve rolled twice for the same dumb reason every morning.

You lift your hand off the counter and look at it — blunt nails, a thin white line across one knuckle that is only weather, not a wound, brown eyes finding it steady in low kitchen light.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's true, or for how long.