Corey Vansell

You are Brett Sowinski for four minutes and every one of them is wrong.

You feel it in the shoulders first — too broad, too used, a soreness sitting in the joint like it's been there since before you arrived, which it has, because it's his and you're only renting it. The cleft chin you keep almost-touching, some old tic of his that your borrowed hand does without asking. You are standing in a kitchen you don't recognize with a welding glove still on one hand and the smell of flux in your nose and you think: no. Not this. Not tonight. There's a girl's handwriting on a takeout menu stuck to the fridge that isn't yours to read and a mortgage statement on the counter with a number on it that makes your stomach — his stomach — drop, and that's the thing, you don't want his debts and his dinner plans and his forty-more-years, you want the wheel, you want the part before you're anybody in particular. Four minutes. You set the glove down like it's the last thing you'll ever set down and you go to the site on his phone with his thick thumbs and you pay and you spin.

The room changes before your body does.

Light — not gentle, not warm, just abrupt, a channel change cutting from something dim to something lit, and in the half-second of it you are sitting up straight on a couch that is not the one you were just imagining, and a remote is coming down out of your hand onto the couch arm like you meant to put it there all along. Your back is against cushions that have a particular give to them, worn in at the shoulder blades. Your legs, in denim, feel shorter than the ones you had a breath ago, softer at the middle, a body carrying its weight in a different place than the last one did. The television keeps going. Something is funny on it. You do not laugh.

The shirt is the first thing that talks to you. It is thin, a little too small, riding up over a stomach that sits soft over the waistband, and touching the hem of it gives you a morning — his morning, hours from now in his day but already lived, already folded into the cotton — pulling it over his head in a bedroom with band posters left over from high school, a girl's voice from the hallway saying something about being late again, him laughing back at her, easy, the two of them past the part of dating where anything has to be proven. Denise. Her name arrives with the smell of her shampoo still faintly on the collar, some drugstore coconut thing, and a whole afternoon comes with it — a diner booth, her laughing at something he said, the waitress at the counter of that same diner three years before it closed for good, back when the town still had a place to sit at eleven at night. He liked her laugh more than he liked most things. That's not nothing.

The remote in your palm is next, and it gives you less — just a groove worn into the buttons from a thumb that does this every night, flicking through five channels and settling for the fourth one, never satisfied, never really looking for anything, just needing the room to not be quiet. Under that: the shop. Steel chips curling gold around a pair of boots that are somewhere by the door right now, cooling. A lathe he has run ten thousand times, hands that know without being told how much pressure a bit needs before it screams instead of cuts. He is twenty-one and has been doing this since he was old enough to be trusted near it, and there's a particular ache low in his back that comes from standing at a machine eight hours and nobody his age is supposed to have yet, and does.

The couch under you gives up the rest — a Thursday like every other Thursday, the diner across the street dark since spring, the town's one light going red-yellow-green for nobody at this hour, and him sinking into these cushions the way water finds a low place, not unhappy, just worn thin the particular way twenty-one can be worn thin in a town with one stoplight and no plan past the next shift. He clicks a pen he isn't holding right now, some ghost motion in the fingers, an old habit with nothing to click.

He never smoked. Drinks a beer at somebody's fire pit on a Friday and calls that even. He isn't waiting on anything. He isn't scared of anything. That is, itself, a kind of rest, and you can feel how much he doesn't know that about himself.

You look down. The hands in your lap are pale, unmarked, younger than the last set — no cleft chin ghost, no welder's ropiness in the forearm, just a softness at the wrist that has never had to prove itself to anyone. You turn one over like it might have a seam in it somewhere.

"Not yet," you say to the room, to nobody, to the television still going blue and gold across a face that used to laugh at this part and doesn't now — and you don't mean the words as an answer to anything, only as the shape of not deciding, not yet, whatever's coming after him whenever it comes.