Craig Vandenberg

You are three minutes into being Kevin Matsuda, and already you hate the freckles.

Not hate, exactly. Kevin's face in the bathroom mirror is fine, unremarkable, twenty-nine years of Ohio winters and acne scars nobody but you will ever count. It's eleven in the morning and Kevin's shift doesn't start till two, so Kevin's body is standing in Kevin's kitchen in Kevin's boxers, holding a spoon over a bowl of cereal that is going soft, and you are the one making it go soft, because you are somewhere else entirely — inside your own stalled decision. The delivery van keys are on the counter. A flash came through them when you picked them up out of habit an hour ago: a long county road, a dog that runs the fence line every time, a satisfaction so small and dumb it almost isn't worth having. That's the whole problem. Kevin's life fits Kevin like a coat that was never yours, and you've been in it three minutes and you already know the coat is thin. Freckled arm. Cheap spoon. A guy who delivers auto parts and is, apparently, satisfied by a dog at a fence.

You are not satisfied. You spun for the man before Kevin because you wanted something with weight, and this is what the wheel gave you instead, and it does not feel like enough to sit inside for even one more bowl of cereal.

The site is still open on the counter next to the keys, because Kevin's laptop was already up, because thirty seconds ago Kevin's hand was the one that opened it, deciding this on your behalf and against it in the same motion. The wheel sits there, bright and stupid and patient. You put the spoon down in Kevin's small kitchen, in Kevin's tired sunlight, and you spin it.

The lamp is the first thing — a warm cone of light on green felt, and under it a shriveled brown hand, fingers curled like a fist that gave up halfway. Your mouth is open. You were saying something, the tail end of a sentence with the shape of a wish still in it, and now the sentence just stops, unfinished, hanging in a throat that isn't the one that started it. One shrunken finger closes. Then another. Your shoulders — heavier than they were, wider — come down out of a hunch you didn't know you were in. You turn the paw over in the lamplight like a man checking a tool he's used a hundred times, though you have never touched it before this second.

The flannel is against your back first, and it comes in fast and warm: a closet in a stucco apartment, hangers scraping, a woman's voice down the hall saying *you're not wearing that to Emma's thing* and him laughing, no, this isn't for Emma's thing, this is garage clothes, and pulling the plaid over a green gym shirt he never bothered to take off from earlier, because he trains clients all day and there wasn't time between the last set and driving down here to the storage unit his buddy rents, the one with the boxing poster on the cinderblock wall and the coin dealer three units down who sold him the paw for forty bucks and a story about Zanzibar that was almost certainly a lie.

Craig Vandenberg. The name comes up out of the collar like a label.

The jeans are next — stiff at the knee where they always are, a permanent crease from squatting next to barbells all day, every day, five years running at the gym on Sepulveda with the busted air conditioning. Your legs remember fourteen-hour Saturdays, spotting a client's bench press at six a.m. and a full slate booked through noon, the particular ache that lives in a dad bod that used to be an athlete's body and isn't anymore and doesn't mind, mostly. A migraine is starting behind your left eye right now, small, familiar, the kind he gets when he hasn't had coffee and has had too much fluorescent light. His hands, resting on the card table, want to go to his mouth — the nails are already bitten to nothing, an old habit that never needed nicotine or a drink to keep it company, because he never did either of those. Never needed to. He has other pressure valves. This paw, for one — some internet rabbit hole about wishes and finger-bones that he half believes and mostly wants to believe, the way a man underwater on a mortgage wants to believe in anything with a mechanism.

That number comes with the boxes stacked behind you — his and Danielle's, half-packed for a move they can't actually afford, a house they bought at the wrong time for the wrong price, six figures of hole with a roof on it. He doesn't say the number out loud in his own head anymore. It just sits under everything he does, the way the whistle sits against his chest at the gym, cold metal, load-bearing.

There are two kids somewhere in this — a flash of a birthday cake, a small hand fisting his shirt at pickup, a name he doesn't get before it's gone — and Danielle's laugh from the kitchen this morning before he left, and underneath both of those, quieter, an old ache with a different woman's name on it, one that never got resolved and just got filed, the way men file things, under *later.*

His mouth was open on a wish. You didn't hear what it was. It's gone now, wherever unfinished sentences go.

You look down. The hand on the paw has calluses across the palm you didn't put there, a bitten thumbnail, a fine dusting of dark hair on the forearm going pale gold where the lamp hits it. You turn it over the way he was already turning it, except now it's you doing the turning, and the light from the desk lamp catches the pale scar through your eyebrow when you finally lift your face toward the little webcam clipped to the shelf behind the boxes — because of course there's a camera, of course he was filming this for someone, some group chat, some proof.

You look into it.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, rough with a headache and something underneath the headache that isn't his anymore. "Wish granted."