Curtis Ambrose

The site loaded slow, the way cheap magic always does — a spinner, a price, a button that looked like it belonged to a raffle and not to anything real. It's the middle of the night on your end, the kind of hour where the apartment hums instead of sleeps, and you have been curious about this for longer than you've been curious about almost anything: not the game, the thing under the game, the idea of waking up wearing someone else's weight. You pay. You spin. You do not expect it to catch.

It catches on a respawn counter ticking to zero.

You arrive already sitting, already heavy in a way you have never been anything, the couch cushion giving under a body that outweighs whatever you brought to it. A controller is warm in two hands that are not the hands you meant to have. The screen throws pale light across a dark room. Onscreen, his character stands up out of cover a half-beat before your thumbs know to move it, and you watch, dumb and late, as it takes fire and drops. You don't chase it. You set the controller down, still lit, still humming, and you sit back into cushions that know this exact dent.

The wedding band is the first thing that speaks. Cool, then warm, worn smooth on the inside — and it comes with a hand reaching across a car seat at a red light on Biscayne, a woman's hand meeting it without either of them looking, twenty-some years of that same unlooked-for reach. Renée. Her name comes with the ring, easy as breath, and behind it a wedding under a tent that didn't hold against the rain, and everybody laughing about it after instead of before.

The T-shirt against your back gives up the morning it went on — this morning, technically, though it is already yesterday to the body wearing it. Curtis had stood in front of the closet at some late hour telling himself ten more minutes of quiet before bed, and pulled this one on because it was soft and didn't matter and nobody was going to see him in it but Renée, asleep already, and the boys, grown and gone but for the older one's junk still stacked in the hall closet behind you — you can feel exactly where those boxes sit without turning around, the way a man knows his own house in the dark.

The classroom comes in through nothing you're touching, just close enough now to surface on its own: thirty desks, empty, the smell of dry-erase marker, the particular tiredness of a Friday last bell when even his voice was ready to be done for the week. Twenty-two years of that room. A boy in the third row two years ago who wrote *you're the only one who didn't give up on me* on the back of a quiz, and Curtis Ambrose, fifty-three years old, high blood pressure, three cups of decaf a day because the doctor took the real coffee too, folded that quiz twice and put it in the drawer where it still is.

His body announces itself plainly, no shame in it, no vanity either — the give at the middle where the belt used to sit easier, the flat ache low in the back from grading standing up at the counter because the desk chair does something to his hip, the buzzed scalp under your palm when you realize your hand has gone up there out of a habit that isn't yours yet but is already comfortable. The cleft in the chin, when you find it with two fingers, comes with nothing at all — just the fact of it, a thing people have commented on his whole life and he stopped hearing.

Somewhere behind the wall, faint, someone shifts in a bed that isn't this room — Renée, three A.M. and undisturbed. The controller sits there on the couch, still glowing at your hip, patient, useless.

You look down. His hands. Broad, dry-knuckled, a small burn scar you didn't put there and can't place a story to yet, the ring catching the TV's dying light. You turn the right one over slowly, like it might correct itself, and it doesn't.

You say, out loud, to the empty room and the dead character still lying facedown onscreen: "Whose game was I even losing."

The wheel doesn't answer. It never has to. It only waits to be spun again, and you don't know when that will be — tonight, in an hour, never before morning finds this man's wife asleep beside a stranger wearing her husband all the way down.