Dale Kowalik

The site loads slow on a dead Tuesday morning, before anything in your day has started, the kind of hour that doesn't belong to work or sleep. You've been circling this for years — the stories, the threads, the question of what it would feel like to not be you for a while. Tonight there's nothing else going on. There never really is. You click the wheel because it's finally real, because you paid, because some itch that's been there since you were a kid watching a face change in a movie wants scratching, and you tell yourself it's probably fake right up until it spins.

It lands on him mid-breath.

You are sitting. There is a bar overhead, cold and textured under two palms you didn't choose the width of, and a body under you that is not stretching where your body stretches, not aching where it aches. The air smells like rubber mats and bleach. A water bottle sweats somewhere near your feet, except they aren't your feet, they're his, planted wide in boots you can feel the broken-in give of. You were told there'd be no warning and there wasn't — one second a screen, the next a chest drawing a breath that isn't yours to draw, hands finding a bar two inches wider than they're used to, and the rest of the set grinding out slow and even, no strain showing on a face you've never had control of before.

The shirt comes first — a flash through the cotton against your back, him pulling it over his head that same evening, the fabric catching on hair still damp from a shower, a small private irritation about how long his hair takes to dry and how he can't be bothered cutting it, hasn't wanted to since before the breakup. Then the overalls, the brass snaps cool against his stomach, the ritual of them — the pocket with the brush handle worn smooth, loading it with the rag he always keeps in the back right pocket, never the left, because the left pocket has a hole he's been meaning to fix for eight months. A whole morning comes with it: taping trim in a gutted living room on Main Street, drop cloths crackling underfoot, the radio turned low because the house is empty and there's no one to talk over, the owner gone to Columbus for the week. The quiet of that work. He likes it. Nobody tells him what brush to use.

The gym bench is steel-cold through denim and it brings back the divorce — no, not a divorce, never married, but her, the ex, Marianne, the shape of her name arriving with the bench's chill like her absence has a temperature. Six months since she packed the car. He comes here now on the nights the house on Oak feels too much like a room he's painting for no one. His left ear throbs faintly, old wrestling cartilage gone permanently thick and soft, a shape his fingers go to without thinking when he's working something out in his head. It aches a little tonight, weather maybe, or just age catching up at thirty-one in a body that still wants to lift like it's twenty.

The tattoo on his arm — tribal, half under the sleeve, done at nineteen with a buddy who's dead now, a memory that comes fast and hot and gone again before you can hold it — pulses with the blood still moving through him, through you, whichever word is true now. His palms know calluses from brush handles, not barbells, and the gym is a newer love, something he picked up after Marianne left because sitting in the empty house with a beer twice a month wasn't enough and more than that scared him, being Catholic enough to still hear his mother's voice about drink.

Average build, five-seven, thirty-one years old, and none of it sore in the way you expected — this body knows exactly how to rack the bar, how to exhale through pursed teeth, how to stand.

You open his hands in front of his face. Turn them. Paint ghosted into the cuticles no matter how hard he scrubs, a half-moon of blue under one thumbnail that three showers haven't touched.

You look up into the gym mirror, into eyes that are his and aren't, and you say, out loud, in his voice: "Who's running this one next."