Daniel Whitefeather Lonetree

I am standing in Tommy Gallagher's kitchen, and I have been him for three minutes. His mouth keeps finding the gap where the front tooth should be. My tongue goes there like a thumb to a bruise. It is Sunday, the middle of the morning, and the cable van is parked outside with a ticket still on the dash for a house I will never visit. He has a day off. He has coffee going. He has a body that works.

What he does not have is any hands for the thing I want. I turned his palms over at the sink and they were only hands, wide and cracked at the knuckle, good at crimping and stripping and nothing else. I am tired of being useful. I am tired of the beard. I want to be a man with somewhere to be, someone with a house that has a light on in it. The page is already open, and my thumb is already over the wheel.

It spins. I am a long way from the sink.

The car drifts a foot toward the line. I pull it back in one smooth motion and my hands come off the wheel, then settle lower and wider. The turn signal ticks on for an exit that is not his. Dark highway, dash glow on my knuckles, the engine humming up through the seat.

Then the memories come, each one through whatever I am touching.

The flannel first, soft and washed thin at the elbows. It is green and black check. He took it off the hook by the back door this morning because the house was cold, and his wife had left it there. Left sleeve, right sleeve. He rolled the cuffs twice, because he always does. Under it is a gray tee, and under the tee is his own warmth. I feel him thinking about nothing, which is how a tired man dresses.

The wheel is cracked rubber under my fingers. A flash comes: his father's truck, the same grip, the same ten and two, thirteen years old and told to hold it steady on a gravel road while the old man laughed. It is pride, sharp and small, and it is his, not mine.

Then the left leg. I press my foot down for the brake and there is no foot, only carbon and a socket that sits snug against the end of a knee that knows it. The memory is a hospital hallway and learning to walk it again. Then a day, years later, when he ran, badly, down a driveway after his daughter's bike, and did not fall. The pride of that stays in my chest like a swallowed coal. The leg bounces on its own, the good one, the way it always does. Even now, with a stranger in him, his body will not hold still.

The ring is cool on my left hand. It turns when I flex my fingers. I see her at a kitchen table with the light behind her, saying his name like it was a question she already liked the answer to. Two small voices upstairs. A door he has to close softly. Under my tongue is a nicotine pouch, mint gone to paste, and I get his craving for it, mild and habitual and almost fond.

My braids lie heavy against my chest. I feel him braiding them in the dark, the pull at the scalp, the care. My jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and the air from the vent cools it. This body is five foot five and compact, steady in the shoulders and tired in the lower back. It is thirty years old and has carried a lot. A badge clips to his belt and a glass office waits for him tomorrow with the door open, because he wants people to feel they can walk in.

The signal ticks. The exit comes up, not his.

I lift my right hand off the wheel and look at it. Brown, broad, a thin gold band. I turn it over. Then I lift my eyes to the dark glass and the road beyond it.

"Okay," I say, in his voice, low and a little rough. "Let's see how long you last."

The signal keeps ticking, and I do not know whether I am still him tomorrow.