Daniel Nakamura

You are standing in a kitchen in Los Angeles, and the man you are wearing is Evan Kowalski, twenty-seven, with a once-broken nose and a beard that itches when he lies. It has been under a minute. In that minute you opened the fridge and found nothing you wanted. You opened a text from Nathan Gallagher that was only a photograph of a classroom whiteboard, and you did not answer it. You were Nathan six spins ago, and you remember the chalk dust in his sleeves and the way he said "buddy" to everyone. Tonight you looked at Evan's skinny wrists and thought: nothing in this one can carry anything. A man you couldn't lift a sheet of plywood with. Under that, the thing you won't say, which is that you keep wanting to hear Nathan's best friend laugh at one of Nathan's jokes, and Evan has never met him. So you go back to the page with the wheel on it. You pay and you spin.

The mattress takes your weight on one side. Blue light is on your cheek, and a phone is six inches from your face, your thumb stopped mid-scroll. Then the thumb moves again, faster and steadier than it was. It flicks past everything he had stopped on, and you are in him, lying on your side in the dark.

Your left leg is bouncing under the blanket, and it does not stop when you notice it. The shirt is soft cotton gone thin at the collar. It is against your shoulder, and it hands you a morning: he pulled it on in the dark of a different day, one sleeve and then the other, while his wife slept with her back to him. He stood a second at the child's door listening to the breathing. The ring is cool against the phone's edge. You turn it with your thumb and get a kitchen, a younger kitchen, and a girl before his wife laughing at him over a burned pan. That ex is why the phone was open to a name he did not tap. It was always there, a small ache, like a nail he'd left in a board.

The pillow smells of her shampoo, and with it comes the slab, wheat stubble, the sky stacking black, the hose coiled at his feet. You feel the hammer's handle in your palm though it isn't there. His shoulders ache from framing, the good ache. His jaw is smooth, and your tongue finds the cleft in his chin from the inside. He is forty-one and he is strong. His knees remember kneeling on concrete. Under the blanket, his sock slides on the sheet.

You lift the phone away and look at your hand. You turn it over: the broad palm, the callus at the base of the fingers, the plain band. You look up at nothing, at the dark ceiling over a sleeping house.

"Okay," you say, low, in a voice that is his. "Hello, Daniel."

The leg is still bouncing. You don't know whether you'll still be him by morning, or by the time the wanting comes back.