Corey Ostrander

The bar is dead, the way Mondays are dead, and Kyle Petrakis's forearms are sweating onto the rail he's wiping for the fourth time in ten minutes. You've been him thirty-one days. Long enough to know his regulars' names, long enough to know he hates the regulars' names, long enough that the boredom has started arriving before noon instead of after. Thirty-five, blond, easy shoulders, a face that women and a few men like without ever quite committing to liking. It was fun for about a week. Then it was a job, which is the one thing you spun the wheel to get away from in the first place, four bodies ago. You catch your reflection in the bottle mirror, Kyle's face catching Kyle's boredom, and you think: not this again. Under the bar, on your phone, propped against a bottle of well vodka, the wheel is already spinning before you've admitted to yourself that you opened the page.

The light goes out of Kyle's eyes exactly as it comes into Corey's — a hundred and eighty miles east and eleven hours ahead of where Kyle's Monday afternoon sits, into a Monday afternoon of its own, because Corey's day started before dawn on a highway and Kyle's is only now sliding toward evening. Corey's hands are at ten and two. Dash light green on his knuckles. Three miles from a cul-de-sac he has driven a thousand times, cicadas going outside the windows he can't hear over the AC, and then the car drifts a foot toward the centerline and pulls itself straight, smooth as a hand correcting a hand, and his fingers come off the wheel and go back on lower, wider, not his grip. The turn signal ticks on for an exit that belongs to somebody else's house.

You are in him mid-breath, mid-blink, foot still steady on the gas, and the first thing that arrives is not memory but weight — he is lighter than Kyle by seventy pounds, shorter by six inches, and the seat is wrong under a body that isn't used to being driven around in something this cheap and this quiet. Your hands on this wheel are thinner, tendons standing up along the backs of them, and there's a warmth low in your jaw that isn't yours yet, just a fact of him: tired, the specific tired of being up since four.

The steering wheel gives you the first of it — gloved once, a long time ago, boot camp, blisters on the heel of the palm now callused smooth, muscle memory of a rifle sling settling in the same grip. Then the seatbelt across your chest, and under it the T-shirt, dark, soft from washing, and it gives you this morning: standing in the barracks lot before first light, buttoning a camo blouse sleeve by sleeve because the sun wasn't up enough to need the roll yet, dog tags cold and then not, the tags themselves giving you the day they were stamped, a recruiter's office, your mother crying in a parking lot for reasons she never fully explained and you never fully asked. The tattoos on your forearm — the unit insignia, needled into you the week you got orders, pride sitting right next to the low bright fear you never told anyone about — hum under your own touch on the wheel like a name being said.

The dashboard glow gives you three miles of a hundred other drives home, the particular tiredness of a shift that starts before the birds, guys' voices in the barracks hall, a bunk you've made eleven hundred times. The gearshift, still warm from your palm a second ago, gives you the used-car lot where you bought this thing at nineteen with your own money and felt, for one entire afternoon, like an adult. Your pocket gives you the lighter — you don't smoke anymore, haven't in a year, but your fingers find it without asking and it flips open and shut, open and shut, a tic older than the habit it used to serve. It gives you a face you don't want, an ex-boyfriend's, gone two years now, the reason you don't examine why your hands still need something to do. Not longing exactly. Just a hole shaped like him that the lighter fits into.

And under all of it, quieter, the thing his body knows and doesn't advertise: the seizures, rare now, medicated, a story he tells almost nobody, a fear that lives in the base of his skull about long car rides and strobe lights and never, ever missing a dose. Twenty-one years in five foot seven of skinny frame, scalp bare under the buzz cut, brown eyes that have looked at very little in this life that scared him as much as that diagnosis did.

Your hands — his hands — come off the wheel one more time; you let them settle back at ten and two, correct now, and you look down at them in the green dash light like they're borrowed tools you're only now getting the feel of. Turn signal still ticking for a house that isn't this one. You reach over, unhurried, and switch it off.

"Wrong exit," you say, out loud, to no one, and you almost laugh, because it's true in more ways than the road, and because somewhere back in a bar in Atlanta a bartender named Kyle Petrakis is thirty seconds from not existing in any way that matters, and you don't know yet how long Corey gets before the wheel calls you again.