Danny Kowalczyk

Marcus Fontaine's feet ache inside shoes that have been on them for eleven hours, and the charting screen in front of him is still open to a dead man's vitals from room 14, and somebody down the hall is buzzing a call button nobody's going to answer for another six minutes. You have been him for less than a minute, all told, spread out across a shift, and already you know the particular flavor of this tiredness — not new, not yours originally either, but the 425th thing to feel like a coat that doesn't fit right in the shoulders. You could go home to his apartment and his cat and the show he's three episodes behind on. You don't want to. That's the whole reason, if you're honest with the part of you that used to be someone else entirely: you don't want to be tired in this specific bald head one more hour. You pull out your phone at the nurses' station, thumb already knowing the address, and you spin.

The kitchen light is doing something ugly and warm at once, hanging low over a countertop that needs wiping, and there is a fork in your hand halfway to a mouth that is not the one you had two seconds ago. It stops there, in the air, an inch from lips that have a little wind-chap to them. You feel the coat first — heavy, canvas, still cold at the shoulders from outside — and the weight of a body that sits lower and lighter than Marcus's, hips more forward, feet planted close together like he's been standing at counters his whole life and learned to save his knees. The fork comes back down. It sets itself on the rim of the plastic container, tines against plastic with a small sound, and you are the one who decided that, though you didn't decide it exactly — his hand simply already knew the container was three-quarters gone and that was enough. You shrug the coat off one shoulder, then the other, and it drops half onto a chair. You sit. You eat the rest in even mouthfuls, not tasting much, looking at nothing in the dark window where a fainter version of this kitchen hangs over the balcony rail and the haze past it.

The sweatshirt is what opens first — gray, soft at the cuffs from a hundred washes, and it comes back to you the way this morning came back to him, except it's not this morning, it's a year of mornings folded into one: him pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, a woman's voice from the bathroom saying something about the baby's temperature, him answering with his voice muffled inside the fabric, not even really a sentence, just a sound that meant *okay, I heard you.* Getting into the jeans one leg at a time on the edge of the bed, socks already damp from yesterday because the dryer's broken and everyone keeps forgetting to mention it to the landlord. The apron isn't on him now but his hands remember its knot anyway, remember tying it twice a day for four years, remember the exact spot on the black canvas where grease always found him no matter how careful he got.

The wedding band is the loudest thing. It's plain, a little tight now that his knuckle has thickened with years of knife work, and touching it — just resting his thumb against it the way he does without noticing — brings back a whole wedding in one wash: a backyard, folding chairs, his mother crying in a way that embarrassed him, his wife's dress catching on a nail in the fence rail and both of them laughing too hard about it right before the ceremony started. Her name arrives sideways, the way names do, attached to smaller things before the big one — her handwriting on a grocery list stuck to this very fridge, her laugh through a phone speaker, the exact temperature of her side of the bed at four in the morning when he gets in from close. And the kid. A kid's shoe by the door that his foot just avoided on the way to this counter, small and Velcroed and left where kids leave things, and with it: a whole balcony evening, weeks back, holding something warm and impossibly light while the ocean haze turned the streetlights into soft coins, this exact body's arms discovering they could hold something that carefully.

His body is twenty-four in every way that matters — a little tired but not old-tired, forearms scarred faint and pink from splash burns and a mandoline slip he still feels a phantom sting from sometimes, back sore in the specific way that eight hours on a line puts into a person, a vape in the coat pocket he hasn't reached for yet but already wants. His hands, now that they're not holding a fork, go without asking to his own cuticles, picking, an old habit that isn't yours and that you let happen because stopping it would take more attention than you have to spare right now. Church on Sundays flickers through, some but not devout, more his wife's doing than his — a hymn number, a potluck casserole dish he was in charge of bringing, the particular guilt of skipping a service for a double shift.

You look down at your hands — his hands, ring and all, cuticles a little raw at the edges, a fine white scar crossing one knuckle he got at nineteen and never told anyone the real story of. You turn the left one over slowly, like the ring might explain something if you look at it from underneath.

"Been a long one," you say to the window, to nobody, in his voice, and it comes out easier than you expected, already sounding like it belongs to somebody who says that most nights.

You don't know yet if you'll still be saying things in his voice tomorrow.