Danny Fuentes

You are standing in Anthony Merced's kitchen in Philadelphia, and it is the middle of the morning, and Anthony's body — 24, muscular, a beauty mark under his left eye, a job at the water treatment plant that starts at six and that you have already decided you are never going to — is not going to walk in today. You have been him for twenty hours and thirty-three minutes. You liked the shoulders. You liked how easy he moved. But you spent the night scrolling a message thread on his phone from a supervisor asking where he was this morning, and some small ugly part of you understood that this body comes with a Monday attached to it, an actual Monday, a chlorine reading that has to be logged by seven, and you did not take four hundred dollars and a spin of a wheel to go stand over a filtration tank. Anthony's coffee is going cold on the counter. You are still holding the mug when you open the site on his phone, thumb shaking a little, not from fear, from something closer to hunger, and you spin without finishing the coffee.

The wheel turns you into weight. That is the first thing — not a face, not a name, just mass, a gut and a chest that were not there a half-second ago, arms gone thick and slack, a stance built for someone who plants his feet wide out of habit. A fork is coming up toward your mouth. It stops in the air. You bring it back down and set it on the lip of a plastic takeout container, and your — his — hand lets go of it like it was never important. There's a coat still on your shoulders, heavy, damp at the cuffs. Outside the window over the sink there is no outside; it's black glass and your own reflection, red hair, red at the roots too, going gray-red at both temples where it's pulled back hard from his forehead. Somewhere behind you a hallway. Somewhere below your feet, cold tile.

You shrug the coat off. It slides down his — your — arms and you let it drop over a chair without looking, because some motor memory in the shoulders knows exactly where that chair is, has known it for years. You sit at the counter stool that groans a little under him, under you, and you keep eating, even mouthfuls, and every mouthful is a door.

The fork first. Its handle worn smooth in one particular spot, and that spot alone gives you a fold-out table in a rehearsal space smelling of amp dust and somebody's cigarettes — not his, he never smoked, the doctor got to him early about the blood pressure and something in him listened to that one thing if nothing else — and four other guys arguing about a set list at one in the morning, and him laughing so hard he had to put the fork down. Decemarch. Nine years of that name on a t-shirt now folded in a drawer, half of it gone quiet, one guitarist moved to Tacoma, one dead of something nobody says out loud, and Danny still hauling a half-stack up two flights of stairs into bars that hold ninety people on a good night, because there is nothing else he has ever wanted his hands to do.

The tattoos come up next, sleeve-deep, and you didn't put them there but you feel the sitting for them, hour after hour, the cross first at nineteen because his mother asked him to get something decent on him before he got something indecent, and the praying hands years later, unasked, the week after a girl named Renata left for good and took the dog, and he sat in the chair and cried without meaning to and the artist didn't say anything about it. Renata still texts him on his birthday. He still answers. Neither of them has said the actual thing in four years.

The counter under your palms is his mother's counter's twin, laminate gone soft-edged with wiping, and it gives you every apartment he's had since Anchorage clawed a piece of him and wouldn't let go — the long amber light in September that makes you believe, for about three weeks a year, that the winter isn't coming. The snowmobile under the blue tarp out back that hasn't run since a battery died two years ago and he has not once gotten around to replacing it, the way you don't get around to things that remind you you're thirty-four and still doing this.

The shirt is the deepest one. Decemarch across the chest, soft at the collar from a hundred washes, and putting it on this morning — hours ago, his hours, the ones that happened before you arrived — comes back sleeve by sleeve: cold apartment, cold floor, pulling it over his head one-handed because the other hand was already holding the strap of the gig bag, thinking about the soundcheck tonight, the same four songs, whether the bar owner would actually pay him this time. He drank something last night he shouldn't have, more than something, and his head is doing the low dull thing it always does now, the thing three drinks used to cause and one now does, and his blood pressure meds are in the cabinet unopened since Thursday. His body is heavy in a way that isn't only weight — tired in the knees, tired behind the eyes, a cartilage piercing that still aches faintly from sleeping on that side. It is a body that has been asked to carry more than food is carrying right now, and it does it anyway, fork to mouth, fork to mouth, because that's what you do at the counter at this hour, alone, coat still cooling on the chair.

You finish the container. You set the fork down inside it, the small clatter loud in the quiet kitchen, and you look down at your hands — thick fingers, a nick healed pale across one knuckle, ink climbing both forearms into the sleeve of a shirt that isn't yours and now is.

You turn them over once, like you're checking they're real, and you say, to the black window and nobody, "Okay. Okay, we'll see how long this one goes."