Colton Weyburn

You are three minutes into being Deepak Anand, and you already know this one is over before it started.

He is standing in the loading dock of a furniture warehouse on Chicago's near west side, and his lower back is a live wire from a dresser he muscled up a ramp an hour ago, and his socks are damp inside his boots, and none of that is why. It's the phone in his back pocket, the one that buzzed forty minutes ago with a message from a woman who is not his wife anymore and was never going to be, a message that said nothing important, and it still put a hook in his chest and dragged. You feel that hook and you think: I do not want to live in a man whose whole nervous system flinches at a name in a notification. You did not choose this body's regrets. You just moved into a house somebody else was already grieving in.

So standing at the tailgate of a truck, keys to nothing in particular in his hand, you open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, because his thumbprint still works, because nothing about the wheel needs permission from the furniture. Vessel dot cards. The wheel loads slow on his data plan. You spin it the way you've spun it eight times before — not sad, not scared, just finished, the way you close a tab.

The mouth that says Colton's name is already yours before the sentence finishes forming.

You are bent slightly at the sink, toothbrush riding the back molars on the right side, water running loud enough to fill the small tiled room, and your — his — shoulders are wider than they've ever been in your life, packed with muscle that did not come from a gym membership but from lifting boxes off a truck bed since he was sixteen. The brush stutters. Not because anything hurts. Because for a half-second there is a second driver reaching for the same wheel, and the hand adjusts, and the stroke starts again, slower now, deliberate, working the molars like someone concentrating very hard on a small task. You rinse. You rinse again. You stand the brush up bristles-first in a glass that has held nothing but this brush for years, and the mirror gives you back a face with a scatter of orange-brown freckles across the nose and both cheekbones, dense as a spray of paint, and pale-blue eyes that are looking at themselves and do not know it yet.

The shirt is what opens first — plain black cotton, soft with washing, and it comes with the memory of an arm going through a sleeve at six-forty this morning, half-awake, the ceiling fan ticking overhead, no alarm needed because his body wakes itself before the sun's all the way up over the Franklins. Jeans next, worn pale at the right knee where he kneels to check a step stool's latch forty times a shift. And under all of it — his skin, his structure — a body eighteen years deep and already stronger than most men get: shoulders built from lifting totes and dollies and appliances up ramps in dry heat, forearms corded from steering a hand truck one-handed, a lower back that is fine, actually, blessedly fine, no wire of pain here, just tiredness sitting honest and earned across the traps.

The sink gives you the van. Not this second, but every morning of it — the particular click of the cargo door, the smell of cardboard and hot vinyl seats, the clipboard app on a handheld scanner clipped to a belt that isn't on him right now but that his palm still remembers the shape of, thumb finding the trigger without looking. You get a name off a mailbox he laughed about once, a dog on Yandell that hates the uniform and only the uniform, a woman on his route who tips in cold Gatorade because El Paso in July doesn't care about company policy. You get church on Sundays, a building with a cross too big for its parking lot, and the particular unbothered quiet of a boy who has never once needed a drink to get through anything, who has never lit anything and never wanted to. You get money — the drum of it, the debt sitting somewhere behind his sternum like a held breath, more owed than a boy his age should carry, though he never says the number out loud to anyone, not even to God, not exactly, more like he leaves it out for God to notice on His own.

You get the house. Turquoise paint gone chalky at the corners, chain-link warm to the touch by ten a.m., the particular white glare of desert light through a kitchen window that makes everything look like it's already noon no matter the hour. You get a mother's voice from another room, unbothered, asking has he eaten. You get, faintly, the small daily fact of being handsome in a way he has never once made use of — a single boy, no one on his mind steady enough to count, freckles that girls at the taquería mention like a joke he's heard before and doesn't mind hearing again.

None of it is dramatic. That's the thing that gets you, every time, in a new one — how much of a life is just Tuesday. Just teeth. Just a tap running.

You look down. The hands on the edge of the sink are wide-knuckled, sun-browned across the backs, pale at the palms, a thin white scar of nothing — no, there's no scar, just weather, just calluses ridged along the base of four fingers where a scanner grip and a hand-truck bar have worn her their groove. You turn the right one over slowly, like you're checking it's real, like it might not hold.

You look up into the mirror, into eyes that are, for the first time in their life, being watched by someone else from behind them.

"Okay," you say, quiet, to no one, to the running tap. "Okay."

You shut the water off with his hand, and the house goes very quiet around you, and somewhere a long way east a Chicago furniture warehouse is missing a man who will never again wonder why his phone stopped mattering — and you don't think about the wheel again yet. You will. Not tonight.