Dallin Redcloud

The accountant's office chair creaks the same complaint it always does when you shift your weight in it, and you feel every one of the sixty years in your lower back doing it. Six-fifteen. The building has gone quiet around you, everyone else already gone home to whatever their evenings are. You've been sitting here for eleven minutes looking at a spreadsheet you finished an hour ago, and that lazy eye of his keeps sliding the monitor slightly out of true, the way it always does when you're tired, which is a thing you notice about him now instead of about yourself, because it's been three weeks and this body still doesn't feel like the inside of anything. It feels like a coat you put on to go outside in weather that never changes. Comfortable. Correct. Boring in a way that sits under your ribs like indigestion. You made partner in this life a decade before you got here and it does not belong to you and it never will, no matter how long you wear it, and today that is suddenly unbearable in a way it wasn't yesterday. You open the site on the second monitor, the one nobody else has ever looked over your shoulder at. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, the way it always is by the time you admit you've decided.

The keys are still in the door behind you, and the box is a weight against your hip, cardboard flex under your fingers, and then it is your hip, your fingers, and the room tips half an inch the way a room does when a stranger walks into it wearing your exact height. Late afternoon light through a bare window, floor the color of steeped tea, walls the color of nothing yet. You set the box down on the boards because your hands already knew to, before you'd caught up to having hands at all.

The keys hang there, cold brass, and something opens off them immediately — a locksmith counter in Fallon, cutting a spare because the landlord only gave you one, the guy behind the counter asking if you were Paiute or Shoshone and you saying neither, just Washoe, and neither of you saying anything else about it. That was Tuesday. Two days of nothing but boxes and a truck borrowed off a guy named Ferris who works the Hendersons' alfalfa two farms over.

You walk the room's edge the way he does, knuckles trailing drywall, and the wall gives you the trailer you're leaving behind — sagebrush against the step, a swamp cooler that never quite won against July, the particular blue of shadows at 6 a.m. when you're up before the crew boss to get ahead of the heat. Your body is twenty-four and it is nothing like being twenty-four in the last one you wore at this age, decades and lives ago, lean and put together by throwing crates for eight hours a day, forearms that ache pleasantly in a way that means something got done. There's a callus map across your palm that isn't yours yet and is already yours completely, ridges where a hoe handle sits, a half-moon of dirt permanent under one thumbnail no matter how hard you scrub. Your jaw is smooth — shaved this morning, a routine so old the razor knows the angle without you thinking, three strokes and done, unlike the gray stubble the accountant grew back by lunch. Your teeth show a gap when you catch your reflection ghosted in the window glass, and something in you — his something, arriving sideways — flinches a little at it the way it has since ninth grade, and then doesn't, because a woman once told him she liked it, told him that in a truck bed under stars outside Winnemucca two summers back, and her name comes with the memory unbidden — Jessie — gone eight months now to Reno and a man who sells boats, and it still sits in his chest like a stone he carries without deciding to.

The shirt on your back gives you the last thing — this morning, pulling it on in the old place before the drive, plaid gone soft from washing, the hoodie underneath already warm from sleep, one arm through, then the other, tugging the collar straight out of habit though nobody was there to see it sit wrong. Boots by the door, laced twice around because the left one's eyelet tore. Coffee he didn't finish. A last look at a room he'd already stopped living in.

You look down at your hands — his hands — and turn one over, feeling the calluses catch against your palm as it closes, knuckles aching for it before you've told them to, and you crack them, one after another, the sound sharp in the empty house.

"Hell of a view for an empty room," you say, to nobody, and it isn't his voice deciding what to say, not anymore, but it comes out of his mouth just the same, gap-toothed and easy, and somewhere far behind it a spreadsheet is still open on a dead monitor, and neither of you know yet how long you intend to stay.