Danny Okafor-Takahashi...

Wait — let me follow the naming rule properly. He is East Asian, lives in Western Kansas.

NAME: Brian Nishida HOOK: A vet asleep on a Sunday morning becomes someone else in one breath.

You are standing in a hallway that isn't yours, in a body that isn't either, four minutes into being Colby Aucoin, and already the itch is back. The light through his window is that flat New Orleans noon, merciless and white, and his knee throbs in a way you know will never fully heal, twenty-one years old and already a repair job. You spun for youth and you spun for muscle and you got both, and it is Sunday and it is boring, this beautiful ruined knee and a body that can dunk a basketball and nothing to do with it but stand in a hallway feeling the day get old. You want out before you get used to him. You always want out before you get used to them. There's a phone in his hand — his, not yours, never yours — and the site is already loaded, the wheel already spinning on the screen from some idle scroll ten minutes ago, and your thumb, his thumb, taps to spin it again.

It lands, and you are horizontal.

Face down. A weight on you like a wool blanket, heavier than Colby's leanness, softer, older. Your arm is hanging off a mattress edge, blood pooling faintly in the fingers, and there's a gap of light needling through curtains that don't belong to any room you've stood in. Middle of the day here too, you'll realize in a moment, but the light is wrong for a man asleep — thin and gray-gold, storm light, not the flat noon glare you just left. The breath that was ragged goes even. Your arm draws itself up without you quite deciding to, and the body rolls, unhurried, onto its back, hands folding over the chest like a man laid out for viewing. You did not do that. The body did that, arriving into its own stillness before you've caught up to it.

Then the room comes in through what's under you — cheap sheets, a mattress with a give to it that isn't home, isn't right — and a name surfaces with the touch: Hays, the extended-stay off the highway, the conference on ruminant repro he drove three hours for and is due to speak at Monday. Your — his — hand finds the seam of the pillowcase and something else comes with it: last night, a hotel bar, four whiskeys he didn't need, a text to Mei that he loved her that he doesn't remember sending and that she'll needle him about later, gently, the way she needles him about everything.

The shirt is still on him, slept in, and it gives you the morning before this one: standing in front of the bathroom mirror at home, humidity already fogging the glass at six a.m., pulling this same soft cotton over his head one arm at a time, the fabric catching, for half a second, on the raised script of the tattoo — Kai & 2018 — his son's name, the year he was born, inked into skin still swollen with pride and terror in a shop that smelled like Lysol. Mei had held his other arm the whole time, laughing at him for flinching. He doesn't flinch from anything else. He flinches from needles.

His hands are heavier than you expect, thicker through the knuckle, a small white scar across one where a spooked barn cat opened him up years ago and he'd stitched himself, badly, rather than drive forty minutes to the ER on a night that was already too long. These hands know how to find a heartbeat through fur and fat without looking, know the particular give of a swollen abdomen, know how to be gentle with something that's dying and firm with something that only thinks it is. He is tired in a way that predates this hotel bed by decades — a tiredness with a shape to it, four years of vet school and twenty more of 6 a.m. calls, and underneath the tired a running hum of thoughts that never fully lands anywhere, thoughts he didn't have a name for until he was thirty-eight and a psychiatrist in Hays gave him one, and it explained so much of his own life to him that he'd sat in the parking lot after and cried like something had finally been returned.

The wedding band is on the hand at his chest, and it opens on its own: Mei in the kitchen doorway of their house outside Colby — the real one, the town, not the man he isn't yet in your head — flour on her wrist, telling him some story about their son's science fair, and him not really listening, just watching the shape her mouth made, thinking *this, still, after everything.* He loves her uncomplicated, without theory. He has never wanted anyone else in fifteen years of being wanted by other people sometimes, in exam rooms, at conferences, and has never once followed it anywhere.

There's whiskey still faintly on his own breath if he could smell it, which he can't, not from in here, but the taste-memory arrives with the mouth itself: too many, most nights, has been for years, a thing he doesn't examine too hard because the examining feels like it would cost him something he isn't ready to spend. He has never smoked. Tried it once behind the clinic in his twenties and it did nothing for him, and he never went back.

His nose — you find it without meaning to, a hand drifting up in the last half-second of arrival, thumb grazing the crooked bridge — a barn door, nineteen years old, not paying attention, and it set wrong because he was too proud to get it re-broken and fixed. Mei says she likes it. He believes her, mostly.

Your eyes open on a stranger's ceiling.

You lift the hand off your chest — his hand, yours now, thick-knuckled, ring catching gray light from the gap in the curtain — and you turn it over slowly, watching the crease of the palm, the small white scar, like you're checking it's real, like it might not hold.

Your eyes come up off it, into whatever is watching, and you say, quiet, testing the new weight of his own voice in his own throat:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."