Corey Vantassel

Harold Lindqvist's knees ache when he sits, and it has been three minutes and they already ache, because sixty is sixty no matter whose choice it was to be here. You are in the ranger station's back room, the one with the dead radio and the coffee maker nobody's cleaned since spring, and the folding chair under you creaks like it disapproves. There's a Sunday quiet outside, cicadas working the heat, and you spent your first three minutes as Harold sitting in that quiet doing nothing, feeling the freckled backs of these old hands, testing the gray in the brows with a fingertip like it might rub off. It doesn't wear well, this one. It's not the ache. It's that there's nothing waiting in it — no love, no grudge, no photograph tucked in a drawer that means something. A body that clocked in and clocked out for thirty years and left no fingerprints on its own life worth touching. You did not drive all the way out here, spiritually speaking, forty-one times over, to sit still in a man who sits still. So the phone is already in Harold's spotted hand, the site already loading, the wheel already spinning behind the glass before you've decided anything at all, because deciding was never really the part that took time.

It lands.

The shirt is chambray, worn soft, and your hand — his hand, thin-fingered, a nose ring's cold ghost at the edge of your vision — is flat on your own chest, feeling ribs that don't belong to Harold anymore, that never did. The top button is threaded through the wrong hole, everything one notch off, collar sitting crooked. You watch, from inside, as fingers you haven't earned undo four buttons without being told to and do them up straight, like the hands already knew before you did. The tie comes next, looping itself into a knot this bedroom has apparently never seen, and some quiet certainty in the wrists says this isn't how he ties it, whoever he is, but it's how you do.

And then the room comes in through everything you're touching.

The collar against your throat gives you a mirror: a bathroom with a cracked soap dish, an electric razor buzzing too close to the mole on his cheek because he always has to check twice that he hasn't caught it. The mole itself: a boy in a Pittsburgh Sunday school, seven years old, a teacher pressing a bandaid over it as a joke, calling it his beauty mark, and how he'd hated that and loved it in the same breath. The shirt sleeve, rolled and unrolled a hundred mornings, gives you a classroom — his classroom — afternoon light through blinds, the smell of dry-erase marker and pencil shavings, twenty-six empty desks and the particular ringing hush after the last bell, how he stands at the front some days just to feel what it's like to be the only person in a room he built. That hush is this hush. Same Sunday, different clock: three states east it's already gone gold outside, while Harold's afternoon back in Texas is still climbing toward its own heat, and something in you notes the gap without needing to solve it.

The waistband of the pants — his mother helped him hem these once, badly, and he never told her — gives you church: her hand on his shoulder in a pew, her voice saying something about a phase, and the year after when he stopped correcting her about the boyfriend and just let her assume what she wanted to assume, because some Sundays it's easier to sing the hymns and skip the argument. The tattoo on his calf, geometric lines under the sock, gives you a tattoo parlor two years back, a Saturday, the boyfriend before this one — the ex who still texts sometimes, who he still measures things against without meaning to — holding his ankle steady while the needle went in, both of them laughing about nothing.

The nose ring gives you this morning's actual argument, the one three minutes old in his own timeline: his current boyfriend on the phone, not fighting exactly, just tired, and Corey saying he'd call after work, and meaning it, and already dreading it a little.

The nicotine pouch still tucked in his cheek — you taste it now, mint gone flat — gives you the whole shape of a habit that replaced a drink he never wanted in the first place, a promise made at seventeen in a youth group tent that he's kept without much effort since, one of the few promises that stuck.

His hands, when you stop steering them, drift up on their own and crack two knuckles, unasked, the way they always do.

You look down at them. Thin, a little chalk-dry, a stranger's hands doing a stranger's small unconscious ritual, already more his than yours will ever be.

"Wrong again," you say, out loud, to no one, meaning the shirt, meaning nothing, meaning maybe something else entirely — and you don't yet know if you'll still be saying things in his voice tomorrow, or if the wheel already has its hand out for you again.