Dale Kittredge

The screen has been blue for an hour, maybe more. Nothing on, nothing worth finishing, the kind of Thursday night that doesn't ask anything of you and gets nothing back. You have had this itch since you were young enough to still call it a game — what if you woke up someone else, what if the self were just a room you could leave — and you have read every thread, watched every film, and never once believed there was a door. Then a card appeared in your feed with a wheel on it, and under it: vessel.cards, and under that, a price you could afford. You tell yourself you are only curious. You pay anyway. You spin.

The mower's engine drops a note under his palms and catches again, and that is the last thing that is only his. You are behind his eyes with no warning and no seam, mid-stride, grass clipping wet against two shins that are not the shins you don't have, sun somewhere behind cloud, the smell of cut grass and gasoline. His earmuff has slipped off one ear and you — not thinking, his body thinking for you — reach up and set it back down, and the mower runs its next pass dead straight where every row before it wandered.

You are short. That arrives first, a low center of gravity, weight packed square through an average build, feet planted wider than you'd have guessed. A shaved head warming under weak light. Two days of stubble prickling gray at your jaw when the wind touches it. The bar of the mower is cold and vibrating in both hands, and the second your palms register the shape of the grips, something comes loose in you that isn't yours.

A tan line on the ring finger, pale as a scar, and with it — not slow, not gentle — a wedding. A woman's face you didn't ask for, laughing under a tent at somebody's summer reception, twenty-some years gone, both of you younger than this lawn has ever known. Then the fights, which came later and lasted longer than the marriage should have. Three kids growing up between the two of you like weather — a driveway of car seats, a graduation you almost missed because of a job that folded under you the week before, another man's name in her contacts now where yours used to be. The ring is off. Has been off. The finger remembers the weight of it more than the hand does.

The shirt is a soft, thinned navy T-shirt, worn through at the collar, and pulling on it — a memory, this morning, hours before you arrived, him alone in a shingled house gone the color of driftwood, the sea a flat gray coin out the window, choosing this shirt because it was the one already draped over the chair, cargo shorts because they don't ask anything of him either. He'd stood in the kitchen a long minute before that, laptop already open on the table, the same three job boards refreshed and refreshed, nothing new since yesterday, since the week before. Sixty-one and starting over is not the same as starting. He knows what that feels like in his shoulders before he knows it in words.

The body under all of it is honest in a way nothing about your life ever needed to be. A twinge low in the back from bending to the mower's pull-cord. Forearms that know this task without being told — how much push, how to walk the crooked line straight — from thirty summers of exactly this lawn. Hands that, left alone a second, drum four fingers once against the bar out of some old habit that has outlived every reason for it. A dry mouth. No cigarette ever wanted, not once, not even the year the divorce was final and everyone told him to want one.

Somewhere further back, small and half-formed, a church he stopped going to but a quiet he never lost — some sense, evenings especially, that the tide going out means something even if nobody's there to mean it. And further back than that, dumber and warmer: a drink most nights, just the one, sometimes a second, poured after the laptop closes and before the lights go off, the taste already in your throat like a rumor.

The mower idles under your palms. You let it die.

You lift both hands off the bar and look at them — blunt fingers, a pale stripe where a ring isn't, grass clippings drying green-black in the creases of the knuckles — and they do not feel like something that happened to you. They feel like something you are wearing from the inside, which is worse, or better, you haven't decided.

"Well," you say, out loud, to the cut grass and the empty dooryard and the cold gray water past the trees, "guess I finished the lawn."

You don't move to start it again. You just stand there, holding a Thursday morning that isn't yours, wondering how long this one is good for.