Danny Petrosky

You are sitting in Ruben Castellanos's kitchen, in Ruben Castellanos's body, less than a minute into being him, and already you know you are not staying.

It's the cleft chin doing it, honestly — every time you catch the reflection in the microwave door you flinch, some ugly little tell of vanity you didn't expect from yourself, thirty-nine years wrapped in a dad bod that some Los Angeles life fed and never asked to run anywhere. There's a stack of textbooks on the table that belong to a class he's failing, a phone buzzing with a name you don't recognize and don't want to. None of it is yours. None of it was ever going to be yours for long. Three hundred and eighty-two men, and you have learned the particular flavor of this itch: not boredom exactly, more like sitting down in a chair still warm from somebody else and feeling, immediately, for the door. Monday afternoon light through a dirty window. You get up, you find the laptop, you open the page with the wheel on it, and you do not think very hard about why. You never do. That's the one thing you don't say out loud, even to yourself: that the wanting doesn't need a reason, it only needs a wheel.

You spin.

The kitchen goes. Everything goes.

You are bent at the waist with salt air in your throat and a net heavy and wet under your palms, and the light is all wrong — low, orange, coming sideways off water instead of down through a window — and your body is enormous in a way Ruben's never was, thick through the shoulders and gut both, weight settled low and solid, standing on a deck that gives slightly under your boots with the boat's breathing. Your hands are already moving. One motion, a hitch and loop you don't have language for yet, comes out backwards, fingers crossing wrong, and you feel — not think, feel, in shoulders that aren't asking you what's wrong — a correction. You do it again, slow, deliberate, right. Then the next one, checked. Then the one after that, checked. Ten times you tie something ten thousand times tied and every single one of them you watch yourself do it like a man reading instructions off his own knuckles.

Nobody on the boat notices. That's the thing about arriving this way — the body keeps its manners even when the man inside it is new.

The net rope is rough and tarred and it is the first thing that gives you him: a flash of his father's hand over his, seven years old, *not like that, like this*, patient in a way the old man rarely was elsewhere. Then more, unspooling off the rope like it's been waiting in the fiber for you. Danny Petrosky. Hauling gear off this same deck since he was a teenager, off Delaware Bay boats before this one, his uncle's boat, work that ate his knees and gave him forearms like cordwood and never once made him rich, only ever comfortable, only ever enough. The beanie on your head — you feel it now, snug over hair pulled back, and it brings the cold mornings, hundreds of them, breath fogging over coffee gone lukewarm in a thermos his girlfriend fills every night without being asked. Carrie. Her name arrives soft and whole, the smell of her apartment, a fight about a wedding date neither of them has actually proposed yet, the easy certainty that it's coming anyway.

The overalls — orange, stiff, salt-stiffened at the knees — remember themselves being put on this morning, this exact pull of suspender over shoulder, the particular give of the left buckle that's looser than the right and has been for two years and he still hasn't fixed it. Under the overalls, the thermal shirt, and under that, him: five-ten, heavier than he'd like to admit to a doctor, but strong in the specific unglamorous way of a man who lifts weight that fights back. His eyebrow itches faintly where the scar sits — a hook, years ago, a story he's told at bars and let get better with the telling. His forearm tattoo — anchor, heart, faded reds gone rust-colored — sits against the wet rope and gives you the shop, nineteen years old, Carrie's older brother who dared him, the pain worse than he let on. Church on Sundays when the tides allow it. A tin of dip in his coat pocket he doesn't touch on deck because the captain hates it. None of this is a life anybody would call remarkable and every part of it fits him like the overalls fit, like something worn in rather than put on.

You finish the tenth knot. It holds.

You look down at the hand that tied it — thick fingers, a rope burn scar you didn't put there, nail beds packed with the day's dirt — and you turn it over slowly, the way you always do, the way you did with Ruben's hand an hour and a world ago. Behind you the rowhouses catch the day's last light, marble steps somebody's mother has been bleaching white for sixty years, a doorway that isn't yours going gold at the edges.

You lift your eyes off your own hand and out toward the water, toward whoever's watching, and you say, in a voice pitched lower and rougher than the one you walked in with:

"Guess I'm not done yet."