Dale Prochniak

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Emiliano's dorm room smells like instant noodles and unwashed sheets, and his hand — thin-fingered, twenty-eight years old, a birthmark shadowing the jaw when you catch it in the mirror above the desk — is shaking a little around the mouse. One minute. That's all you got this time. You spun, you landed, you sat down in a body that has an 8am recitation section it is already going to miss, and within sixty seconds of arriving you know: this is not it. Skinny arms. A roommate's cereal bowl crusted in the sink. Some feeling in the room like a held breath nobody let out. You did not choose this. Nobody ever does. You open the laptop already open in front of you, the login already remembered because his fingers remember it even if you don't, and you go back to the wheel out of nothing more than restlessness — the specific kind that comes from being handed a life that isn't yours and finding, immediately, that you don't want it either. Thirty-two men behind you and still this itch, this need to see what's next, what else there is to wear. You put in the money. You spin.

The wheel turns and lands on a Wednesday too, but hours ahead of this one, in a rowhouse in Philadelphia where a man is asleep in the middle of the day because his body has been waking at 4 a.m. for thirty years and dropping somewhere around eleven, wrung out, sun or no sun.

His breathing goes from ragged to even in a single breath that isn't his anymore. The arm hanging off the mattress — heavy, tanned to the elbow and pale above it, a plain gold band catching the gap of light through the curtain — draws itself up on its own. The body rolls onto its back. Hands fold at the chest, fingers laced, like a man laid out for a viewing, which he has never once done in his sleep in fifty years of sleeping, and something in the quiet of the room seems to notice the wrongness of it even if nothing in the room can say so.

Then: everything he is, arriving through what you're touching.

The sheets first — worn cotton, washed a thousand times, and there's a woman's shampoo smell drifting off the far pillow that opens something before you even understand it: *Carol.* Nineteen years married. An argument two nights ago about the Delgados' addition job running long, a good one, the kind you have when you trust each other completely and can afford to raise your voice a little. She left for her shift at the dental office before you fell into this nap. There's a note downstairs, you know suddenly, though you haven't seen it — *soup in the fridge, love you, don't work today you look wrecked* — and the knowing arrives with a warmth behind the sternum that isn't yours and that you didn't ask for.

The ring is next, worn thin at the band from thirty years of gripping a hammer, and it brings the wedding itself, a hot August at Old St. Joseph's, his brother as best man, the two of them sneaking cigars behind the church that Dale never picked up as a habit because Carol hated the smell and he found out he didn't care much for it either. The dimples in the photographs from that day — his mother's dimples, showing even when he wasn't smiling, showing now, slack, against the pillow, because they never really go away.

The body under the sheet: fifty years old, a gut that wasn't there at thirty, shoulders that still do the work because the work never stopped needing them. A knee that clicks going down ladders. A lower back that has opinions every October when the weather turns. Forearms that know, without being told, the weight of a bundle of shingles, the give of an old roof deck underfoot, which boards are soft with rot before the foot even finishes coming down on them. Hands that, when nothing else is happening to them, go to the cuticles and pick, worry them raw, a habit Carol has given up trying to break him of.

The crew cut comes with a memory of a barber named Sal who's cut it the same way for eleven years, three blocks from here, and complains every single time about the Eagles' offensive line. The gray of it arrived faster on the sides than the top, which annoyed him at forty-two and stopped mattering somewhere past forty-five.

And under it all, further down, a whole life running past like water: the roof two days ago, the town spread out below in the heat-shimmer, a Wawa hoagie eaten sitting on a ridge beam at noon with his foreman Pete, forty-one dollars an hour after thirty years in the union and he is not sorry, not for one day of it, even the winters. Church on Sundays, most Sundays, less than his mother would like. No kids — a fact that used to have grief folded into it and doesn't much anymore, not after this many years, just a smooth worn place like a stone in a pocket. Nothing he'd bring up if you asked him what he carries. He is, by every account he'd give you himself, a lucky man, working at a job he still likes at fifty, married to a woman he still wants, home at a decent hour most days, sleeping now because the body earned it.

And then it's not his hand.

You lift it off your own chest — his chest — and turn it in the striped light from the curtain, and it is thick where Emiliano's was thin, tan-lined at the wrist, a hammer-callus riding the base of the thumb, the ring catching the light and throwing it back at you.

You sit up. Somewhere down the block a delivery truck downshifts and somewhere in this house a note waits on the kitchen counter in a wife's handwriting for a man who is not going to be entirely the one who reads it.

You say it out loud to the empty room, to nobody, in a voice with thirty more years of gravel in it than you had five seconds ago:

"There he is."