Danilo Ferreira

It's a Sunday that doesn't deserve the name — late morning, nothing on, the blinds doing their slatted half-job against the light. You have had the tab open for eleven minutes before you let yourself click it. vessel.cards. A wheel on a page, rendered in a gaudy carnival gold that someone clearly thought was funny. You have wanted this since before you could say what "this" was — every swapped-body movie you half-remember, every thread you read at two in the morning insisting it happened to a friend of a friend, every daydream that started with *what if I just woke up as* — and never once has it been a thing you could actually buy. You pay. You don't believe it will do anything. You spin anyway, because wanting something for twenty years and finally being able to pay for it is its own kind of helpless.

The wheel stops.

You are cross-legged on a rug that smells of other people's feet, and your mouth is already open around a word you didn't choose. The second attempt at the third line comes out of you clean — not your voice doing it, some older shape in the jaw doing it for you — and a man's hands, not yours, turn a water-stained page without looking down. There's a body around you before you've finished arriving in it: compact, warm, a low ache already sitting in both knees from sitting this way too long. Lamplight, not sun — the window behind it has gone the flat violet of evening. Somewhere outside, a rooster that has no idea what time it is.

The book under his — your — hands keeps feeding you. Not words. Just a small cheap thrill, the kind you get from a dare: *this isn't real, none of this is real, but say it like it's real.* Flash of the séance two hours ago, six people on folding chairs laughing at themselves, somebody's cousin lighting a candle with a barbecue lighter because nobody could find matches. Flash of leaving that circle thinking it was a nice dumb evening and taking the book home anyway because the cover felt good in his hand, cracked leather gone soft as cloth.

The rug under your folded legs gives you more: this is not his rug, this is a client's rug, in a client's front room, and he stayed forty minutes past his shift because Mrs. Agbayani wanted someone there when her nephew's séance friends showed up with their candles and their nonsense, and he'd laughed along and thought, privately, *harmless*, and found the book shoved behind a stack of phone books after, and asked if he could take it, and she'd said sure, who wants that old thing.

The shirt against your back — thin blue cotton, soft from too many washes — gives you the morning. Early. Before the rooster, before the glare came all the way up off the red dirt yard. Pulling it over his head one-armed, the other hand already reaching for the scrub top he'd layer over it later for his actual shift, because this blue shirt is not work, this is after-work, this is the shirt he puts on when the day is his again. A tug at the left ear — the hoop, cool, familiar, in before he even looks in the mirror, a habit older than he can place now. Scrubs folded over the chair from last night, navy, the zip hoodie with the frayed cuff he's meant to replace for two years. The canvas bag strap that lives on his shoulder like a second collarbone, worn pale where it crosses.

More comes, uncalled, generous: a wedding that didn't last, nobody's fault exactly, just two people who wanted different sizes of life; her face is soft-edged now, more weather than feature, but the fight about moving to the mainland is still sharp as a struck match. A daughter, nine, who has his freckles exactly, scattered the same careless way across her nose, and who he picks up every other weekend and takes to the beach at Sandy's even though the shorebreak scares him more than he'll say. The small quiet fact that he has never told anyone at the agency he counts his rosary some nights not out of faith exactly but out of homesickness for his grandmother's house, the smell of candle wax and Pine-Sol. Pill organizers lined up like a week laid out in plastic. A client's hand, papery, gripping his wrist too hard during a bad afternoon, and him staying anyway, past the hour, because somebody has to.

His body is forty-one and knows exactly what it's for: strong through the shoulders from years of helping people stand who can't quite do it alone, tired in a specific, bearable way behind both eyes, the knees complaining faintly about the rug and about the whole shape of the day. No drink in him ever, no smoke, just coffee gone cold somewhere and the particular cleanliness of a man who showers after every shift whether he needs to or not.

You finish the page. The syllables land right this time, a mouth that has apparently always known how to make this shape, and something in the room changes — pressure, maybe, or nothing at all, maybe just you noticing yourself for the first time.

You look down. Freckled hands, broad enough, a thin pale line on the left where a watch usually sits, not sitting there now. You turn them over once, like checking they're both real, both yours for exactly as long as yours means anything.

You look up into the lamp-lit room, into whatever is left of the evening, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."