Corey Baptiste

The apartment is quiet in the particular way apartments get at that hour, screen-light and nothing else, everyone else asleep or pretending to be. You have scrolled through everything there is to scroll through. This has been the itch for years — not a hobby, not even really a secret, just a thing you think about more than you'd admit, waking up as somebody, anybody, the actual weight of another life dropped onto you like a coat. You'd looked for it before, the way people look for things that don't exist. Then the site did. Plain page, a wheel on it, a price that felt like a joke until you paid it. You spin before you can talk yourself out of it. The wheel does what wheels do. It stops.

There is a spoon in your hand and it is stirring in a circle and then it stops and goes the other way, because you are new to the motion and your body — his body — hasn't caught up to the correction yet. Heat off a pan. A kitchen that smells like onion and a little bit of scorch. You are tall in a way that surprises you, weight sitting low and solid through the legs, and the light overhead is the ugly yellow of a bulb that's been left in too long. You salt the pan without tasting it because you don't yet know this is a thing he always does, salts by feel, and your hands — his hands — reach up into the cabinet on their own and bring down a second plate. You set it beside the first. You do not know why. Nobody is coming. Nobody has been coming for weeks.

The shirt is what opens first. It's soft, worn-in, a black ribbed polo he keeps for nights like this one, and putting it on this morning — his morning, hours and hours ago now, though it arrives in you all at once — comes back sleeve by sleeve: the mirror in the hallway, the way he'd rolled his shoulders back to check the fit, a small vanity he'd never admit to anyone at the plant. He'd showered after a double, dressed slow because slow felt good after sixteen hours on his feet directing forklifts and signing off pallets, a manager's clipboard voice all day and nobody to use his real one on come the evening. Middle of the night here. Middle of his shift's tail end, if he'd stayed on days, except he hadn't — three weeks into nights now, covering for a guy who quit, and his body still hadn't forgiven him for it. That's why the apartment is dark and everyone on the street asleep and him standing at a stove making dinner that is also breakfast that is also nothing, just food, because eating alone at 2 a.m. stopped feeling strange sometime in October.

The second plate is Danielle's, except Danielle hasn't lived twelve minutes away in six weeks, and the hands don't know that yet, or know it and did it anyway, the way you set a table for a house that emptied out on you. Before her — a flash, sharp and unbidden — there's an older ache, a different woman entirely, a ring he never bought, a fight in a car outside his mother's church that ended something he still doesn't fully understand the shape of. The counter under your palms is chipped Formica and it has held his elbows through both of those women and neither one stayed and the plate stays out anyway, a habit stronger than the fact underneath it.

The floor under his bare feet is old pine, warped a little near the stove, and he knows exactly which boards give. His shoulders know the particular ache of moving pallets since six that evening, the good clean tired of a body used properly. His jaw works at nothing — no dip in tonight, he'd left the tin in his other pants — and there's a phantom itch for it anyway, the mouth wanting something to do. His right leg, standing still at the stove, is already bouncing, has always bounced, since he was a boy in a pew being told to be still and never quite managing it. Six-three of him and none of it soft, and none of it decorated either — no ink, no chain, no ring, nothing he'd ever thought to put on his own skin — just muscle built by lifting other people's freight and calluses along two fingers where the pen sits when he's cosigning invoices he doesn't care about.

There is a whole marriage in the cabinet where the good knife is, a woman's laugh he can still hear better than her name for a second, and there's a version of himself at nineteen selling something he shouldn't have on Freret Street, scared and loud about not being scared, and there's his mother's voice saying his name the exact way she says it when she's not really mad. It all comes in through what he's touching — spoon, pan handle, chipped counter edge, the collar of a shirt gone soft from a hundred washes — each one a door, and behind each door a year, and you stand in the little kitchen taking all of it in like weather.

You look down. The hand holding the spoon is not a hand you have ever owned. You turn it over, palm up, and the yellow light catches a callus at the base of each finger, a story you didn't live and now, apparently, keep.

You lift your eyes off it, into the empty doorway where no one is standing, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Who am I feeding."