Danny Choi

The dispatch app is dark on the dash and the car is parked crooked in a gravel lot outside a Speedway that closed hours ago, and you are sitting in Marcus's body with the seat leaned back and the dome light off, feeling his heartburn from the gas station burrito he ate at nine, feeling how his knee has started clicking on the clutch, and none of it is new anymore. Six weeks in this one. Long enough to know the goatee itches when the heat's on, long enough to know the dimples don't do anything for him with nobody around to see them, long enough that the fares have started to blur into the same ten streets and the same three bars closing out the same three Thursdays. Nothing happened to him. Nothing is wrong with him. That's the whole problem — comfortable, muscled, well-liked at the one bar he tips well at, and you already know every inch of how that goes from here. You open the site on your phone in the dark because the itch is not for anything, it is only for elsewhere, and elsewhere is the whole business model. You pay. You spin. Somewhere far off a wheel that isn't a wheel decides, and you are already leaving before you feel yourself go.

The spoon is still between your fingers when you arrive, mid-stir, and it is the wrong hand doing it — smaller, no ring, the wrist thinner than the one you had half a second ago — and you nearly overcorrect the stir into a splash before the body's own habit catches it. Steam is coming up warm against a face that is not stubbled, that has no stubble at all, jaw smooth as if it had been shaved an hour ago for no one. The window in front of you is dark blue going black, a streetlamp just starting to commit to orange in it, and somewhere behind you a single bulb on a cord is doing all the light in the room. You salt the pan. You do not taste it. Your hand — his hand — reaches up into the cabinet on its own, before you've decided anything, and comes down with a second plate, and sets it next to the first one on the counter, and you don't know why yet, only that the hand knew.

Then the shirt gives it to you: navy hoodie, soft at the elbows from washing, and there's a whole morning folded into the sleeve — him pulling it on over his head still damp from the shower at the harbor showers, salt-smell never quite out of anything he owns no matter how many times it goes through the wash, the particular ache low in both shoulders that isn't pain exactly, just twenty years old and already permanent, four seasons of hauling line into it. Under your sock feet the kitchen linoleum is cold and cracked at one seam and you know without being told that he meant to fix that seam in October and didn't. The overalls aren't on him now, they're hung on a hook by the door, but your palm remembers their weight anyway, remembers Sitka rust-orange rubber gone stiff at the knees, remembers the boat's name stenciled somewhere you can't currently place, remembers first light on gray water and the particular good tiredness of pulling a net that's heavy because it's supposed to be heavy. He likes it. That part surprises you — the work isn't punishment to him, it's the one place his head goes quiet.

The second plate keeps pulling at you. A name arrives with it before a face does — Sarah, and then her face, and then the fact that she isn't coming tonight, that this was supposed to be for her and got cancelled by text an hour ago and he set the plate out anyway out of some stubbornness the hand didn't consult the rest of him about, muscle memory of a habit two months old, since the first time she stayed for dinner in this kitchen with the bad linoleum. There's a whole month in that — her laughing at the toughness of something he overcooked, her cold hands under the hoodie sleeves, a text conversation from this morning that made him grin at his phone on the dock while Kenji ribbed him for it. Nothing tragic in any of it. Just a kid dating somebody he likes, alone tonight for a boring reason, feeding himself anyway out of habit and hope both.

Your ears prickle — small studs, cheap ones, bought with a paycheck he was proud of, sixteen years old and getting them done at a mall kiosk against his mother's raised eyebrow. That memory is warm and short and gone. Your fingernails, when you notice them, are bitten down close on every finger, an old unbothered habit that isn't anxiety so much as just something the hands do while the rest of him is somewhere else, out on the water usually, thinking about nothing in particular. The body under all of it is nineteen and knows things you don't — how to read a swell before it hits, how to coil rope without thinking, a tiredness in the forearms that isn't tired exactly, just used, just working right.

You look down at the spoon in your hand, then at the hand itself — smooth-knuckled, someone else's bitten nails, salt still faintly in the crease of the palm no matter how many times it's been washed — and you turn it over once like it might tell you something it hasn't already.

"Guess I'm still hungry," you say to the empty kitchen, to the two plates, to nobody, and you don't know yet if that's true, or for how long, or whose hunger it even is.