Craig Holsapple

The sales calls end at five and the apartment stays quiet the way it always does, and that quiet is the thing that sends you back. You have been Danny Reyes's replacement — no, not him, the beard, the green eyes, the gut you never asked for and never grew fond of — for less than a minute, and already the thought of another evening inside him, microwaving something, scrolling something, being nobody in particular, is unbearable. Comfortable isn't the word. Correct is the word. You want to be inside somebody whose hands are doing something. You open the laptop before you've even sat down, and the wheel is already loading, and you don't wait for the coffee to finish or the day to actually end. You spin it standing up.

The power drops for two seconds. Not in Los Angeles — nothing happens there, the sales rep's body just stands abandoned at a counter, blinking at nothing, still holding a spoon. Somewhere else the lights genuinely go out: a tattoo parlor, hard Sydney daylight coming through a window, a small brownout that makes the machine in the artist's hand stutter to silence. When the light comes back, the forearm underneath it has stopped flinching.

You are the arm. You are the whole of him, forty years of him, stopped mid-flinch with a stranger's gloved hand pressing a paper towel to green soap and blood-thinned ink, and the first thing you understand is that you are not afraid of the needle anymore, because the man who was afraid of it isn't the one feeling it. You turn your head — his head — away from the window and toward the work, and you watch the line going into your own skin like it's happening to a chair, to a countertop, to anything that isn't you.

The earring is cold and small against the side of your face when the movement shifts it. That's the first thing that comes through — not a memory exactly, just a fact arriving with feeling attached: he got it at twenty-six on a dare from a woman named Els, on a beach, laughing, and it stuck the way the dare didn't. Els is the one who got away. You know that the way you know your own name is not your own name. She left for Perth twelve years ago and he still, unaccountably, on nights he's had two drinks instead of one, thinks the silver hoop was the only smart decision he made that whole year.

The wedding band gives you the rest of it, cool and plain against the fingers of the hand not currently pinned under a tattoo gun. Her name is Bridget. She works triage two floors up from where he charts. They married nine years ago in a church that mattered to both of them more than either admits out loud anymore, and there are no children, and there was a stretch of years where that silence in the house was a wound and is now just weather. He prayed about it more than he told her. He still does, sometimes, in the car, at red lights, badly.

The scrub top he had on this morning — not this shirt, the gray one from the photograph on his phone's lock screen, taken by Bridget on the ferry wharf with the harbor going white behind him — comes back through the memory of putting it on, sleeve by sleeve, the fabric snagging slightly on the tremor he hides by keeping his hands busy. The tremor. It's been there two years, small, worsening some mornings and vanishing on others, and he has not told anyone at the hospital because a nurse whose hands shake is a nurse who gets reassigned to a desk, and Craig Holsapple did not spend eighteen years building forearms like these — muscle laid down by lifting patients twice his weight, by hauling gear, by nothing you'd call a gym — to end up behind a desk. He grips a chart harder than he needs to. He grips a patient's IV line harder than he needs to. He is compensating for something he has decided, quietly, God will sort out or won't.

The vitiligo doesn't come from touch, it comes from the mirror he stands in front of every morning, the pale map spreading slow across one side of his jaw and both forearms and the backs of his hands, and the year he hated it, seventeen, and the decade after that he stopped noticing it except when a stranger noticed it for him. The anchor tattoo sits half over one of the pale patches, colors gone soft with fourteen years of sun off the water, and he chose the design because his father sailed and never once took him sailing, and there's a whole Thursday — no, a whole Friday, his Friday, his lunch shift, the particular boredom of the nurses' station at this hour, the coffee going cold under fluorescent light — sitting behind that single fact, but you don't need all of it. You have enough. You have him dressing this morning, badge clipped to the pocket over his heart, checking the earring in the mirror out of habit, kissing Bridget goodbye without either of them saying much, walking out into hard clear light toward a day that was supposed to end with a new tattoo and a beer and nothing more complicated than that.

The machine has stopped. The artist is watching your face with faint concern, the kind you get when a client goes somewhere behind his eyes mid-session.

You lift the marked arm and turn it, slow, in the window light — pale patches, old ink, a thin line of blood beading where the needle paused — and it does not shake, not this second, though you can feel already that it wants to.

You look up into the artist's face like it's a lens.

"Sorry, mate," you say, in his voice, in his accent, easy as anything. "Lost the thread for a second there."