Danny Fiorillo

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You are standing in an open house in Murray Hill when the boredom finally tips over into something you can act on. David Yoon's loafers pinch a little at the heel — not his loafers, really, somebody's loafers he bought two weeks ago in this body, or two years, the memory isn't clean yet — and you are watching a young couple pretend to admire crown molding they will never buy. You have been David for less than a minute of his life and forty minutes of yours, and already the taste of him is thin. Real estate is patience wearing a blazer. You have a card that gets you into buildings and a mouth that says square footage and neither one is any fun to be. Your thumb finds the phone in David's pocket, and the pocket already knows the shape of it, muscle memory not yours doing the work anyway. Monday afternoon light through somebody else's staged windows. You open the site because there is nothing else to open.

The wheel spins the way it always spins, a blur of nothing, and it gives you a kitchen you have never stood in.

The wooden spoon is already turning counter-clockwise in your hand and then it is turning the other way, and that is the first thing you know — the small violence of the reversal, a wrist correcting itself mid-stir for a reason that isn't yours. Steam off the pan. Bare feet on cracked linoleum, warm from the oven's pilot light underneath. You salt without tasting, an automatic hand, and then you are reaching up into a cabinet and your fingers close on a second plate, white, chipped at the rim, and you set it down next to the first one on the counter like there's someone coming.

There isn't.

The gray shirt is soft against your back, worn a hundred washes past new, and it gives you him folding it that morning — no, not folding, grabbing it off the floor of a bedroom with a poster still up from high school, pulling it over his head one-armed while the other hand held a coffee mug, because he was already running behind for the eleven o'clock open gym. Sweatpants next, the elastic gone loose at the waist, and with them a whole freezing gym at six a.m., his breath fogging over a mat that smells like rubber and old sweat and Lysol, thirty pounds of teenage boy trying to buck out of a cradle while Danny's voice cracks out *hips, hips, HIPS* in a register that isn't coach-stern so much as coach-desperate, loving it anyway.

The whistle isn't around your neck right now, but the ghost of its cord is, a phantom weight, and touching your own collarbone where it usually sits gives you the hoodie instead — Wildcats Wrestling, faded navy, and under it, skin-warm, the tattoo you can't see but can feel like a temperature: praying hands, a cross, done at nineteen the week his grandmother died, in the house on the block with the marble steps worn into soft white dips by eighty years of other people's shoes before his. Sunday dinners at that house. Her rosary in a dish by the door. He isn't devout, not really, hasn't been inside a church that wasn't for a wedding in years, but he believed something was watching when he got the ink, and some Sundays now he still thinks it's watching, loosely, kindly, without asking anything of him.

The stove's gas smell opens a narrower memory: her kitchen, this same recipe, chicken and peppers going soft in a pan too small for the portion, and the two plates. You understand the second plate now, holding it, the chip under your thumb — there is a woman who used to sit across from him at this counter and doesn't anymore, gone eight months, and his hands keep setting a place for her out of some old animal courtesy that hasn't caught up to the facts. He knows he's going to have to put it back in the cabinet in a second. He does it most nights anyway.

Your lungs pull tighter than they should on the steam, a small catch, familiar to him and alarming to you for one heartbeat before you recognize it — asthma, mild, an inhaler somewhere in a gym bag by the door, not tonight's problem. Twenty years old in this body and it shows in the forearm turning the spoon, the wrist that's cracked ten thousand times in frustration on a mat, the whole frame built by drilling takedowns instead of a gym membership — strong through the shoulders in a way David Yoon's desk-softened arms never were. It feels like being let out of a small room.

You look down at the hand holding the spoon. It is not your hand. It has a scar you didn't put there and a callus at the base of the thumb from years of grip fighting, and you turn it once, slow, watching the tendons move like you're checking they're real.

Then you look up, past the stove, toward nothing in particular, and you say, to the empty kitchen and the plate nobody's coming to sit at:

"Guess it's just me again."