Colton Wexley

The hives are quiet at this hour, which is the only mercy of it. You are standing in Osvaldo Terán's dark kitchen in Brisbane, sixty-one years old in his knees, his back, his heavy gray-haired weight, and you have been him for three minutes and that is already enough. The joints ache in a way that has nothing to do with you. The house smells of eucalyptus smoke and old man sweat and it is not yours to smell. You did not spin for a beekeeper. You did not spin for gray hair or a widower's silence or a body that creaks getting up from a chair. You wanted to feel something move fast for once, and this one barely moves at all. So at nearly midnight, everyone in this house long asleep, you open the laptop on his kitchen table, and the wheel is still sitting in the browser tab from last time, patient, glowing faintly blue in the dark, and you spin it again with his thick arthritic thumb, and somewhere on the other side of the world it is the middle of a Monday.

The stumble happens on a canal path in fog. Two steps that never land, and then you are running.

Your feet are smaller. Lighter. The impact off the concrete comes up through legs that have never known sixty years, muscle answering before you ask it to, breath already even, cold air tasting of wet grass and diesel from a road somewhere off to the left. Your arms are lower than you expect them, a stride shorter and quicker than the shape you were braced for, and a watch on your left wrist buzzes once with a split time it never recorded you setting. Earbuds feed you the tail end of a song neither of you chose. The sun is barely up. Steam comes off the water beside the path in ropes.

The shirt is what starts it — black, damp under the arms, clinging with the specific sweat-smell of a body you have never worn, and through it comes a hand pulling this exact shirt over a shaved head in a bedroom lit gray-blue before dawn, a girlfriend still asleep with one arm thrown across the empty side of the bed, the soft click of the front door so it wouldn't wake her. Colton. The name arrives with the shirt like it was folded into the collar. Colton Wexley, twenty-five, and this is a body that runs four miles most mornings because sitting hunched over open mouths eight hours a day does something to the neck and shoulders that only running seems to undo.

The shorts against his thighs bring a whole gym, months of it, the specific ache of legs that lift and lift and are asked to be strong for no one but himself — no sport, no team, just the private vanity of a man built like this who spends his days speaking softly around a suction tube and a light swung down too close to someone's face. The watch buzzing at his wrist brings the chair itself: the overhead lamp, the blinds half-open on Magazine Street, a patient's nervous joke he's heard four hundred times, his own hands — steady, sure, freckled to the knuckle — doing work that terrifies most people and doesn't touch him at all anymore. He is good at it. He likes being good at it. There is a particular pride, arriving whole and unearned into your chest, of a man who chose a career precisely because his own hands never shook.

The earbuds bring music, a girlfriend's laugh from a shotgun house one room wide, steam rising off a wet French Quarter street after rain, her voice through a doorway three rooms long calling that breakfast's cold now, go run then, baby. A vape, shared on a porch step some humid evening, passed back and forth, nothing in it that matters. A mother's voice on the phone, Sunday ritual, faith that isn't church but is something, some quiet prayer said alone before the first patient every morning. None of it dramatic. None of it his to tell anyone. A clean, unremarkable, well-built life, twenty-five years deep and none of the years wasted.

The canal path itself comes up through his feet, wet concrete, cold, familiar — hundreds of dawns exactly like this one, fog lifting off water he has never once stopped to really look at, always mid-stride, always somewhere else in his head, alive and ordinary and utterly unaware that this is the morning it stops being only his.

You look at the hand nearest your face — his hand, freckled, calloused faintly at the pads from tools you have not held yet — turning it slowly in the weak gray light while your feet, on their own, without asking you, keep running.

You say, out loud, to no one on the empty path, "Okay. Okay, this one I'll actually use."

And you keep running in him, into the fog, not yet knowing for how long.