Danny Reyes

Todd Brannigan's hand is still greasy from the line when you feel it start again — the itch under his sternum, the one that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with you. Less than a minute in this one and already you're doing the math on how a forty-one-year-old assembly worker's Thursday goes: eight more hours on shift, freckled forearms aching by four, a beer alone in an apartment that smells like somebody else's cooking. You didn't pick him for keeps. You never do. The itch isn't boredom exactly — you have three hundred bored men filed away already — it's the particular flatness of Todd, the sense that his best hour already happened and you weren't in it for it. Seattle afternoon light through a break-room window. You set down the coffee his hand was holding, the one he hadn't finished, and you think: not this one, not today, and your thumb finds the phone in his pocket before the rest of him even agrees to it.

The wheel spins somewhere that isn't a place. Then you are not falling, you are already standing, already exhaling the tail end of a word that isn't yours yet.

The mirror is fogged except for the hand-wide stripe he wiped clean, and his mouth — your mouth now — is closing on the last syllable of something said out loud, a wish, and for one strange beat the word keeps traveling past the point where his lips shut, like an echo let off its leash. The fog creeps back over the clear stripe almost immediately, erasing the reflection, and the body you're in reaches up on reflex and wipes it again, slow, and looks itself over from the collar down like it's checking a delivery arrived intact.

Eighteen years old in this frame. Compact weight, all of it useful — you can feel that immediately, the difference from Todd's soft middle-aged solidity. This one's shoulders sit forward, ready, like they've spent all day lifting things and haven't been told they can stop. There's a bathroom around you smelling of steam and drugstore soap, tile warm under bare feet, a shower still ticking as it cools. Evening light, gold and low, through a window with a cracked blind. Nashville. His clock says late in the day where yours said early afternoon, and the gap sits strange in your chest for a second before it stops mattering.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. It's hanging open over a plain white tee, not yet buttoned, and the second your fingers — his fingers — brush the collar, something comes through: this morning, or a morning enough like it, pulling this exact denim shirt off a hook by the door, left sleeve first because the right shoulder's stiff from yesterday's shovel work, a habit worn so deep it isn't a decision anymore. Boots by the door catch the next flash — steel toes, mud dried into the seams in a map of a trench he stood in most of today, spoil piled at the lip of it, the excavator's diesel cough behind him, a foreman's voice calling out a grade. The ache lands with it: low back, a burn behind both knees, forearms pumped tight from a shovel that never got lighter no matter how many years he told himself it would.

The jaw under your palm is smooth — shaved that morning in this same mirror, before the fog, before anything — and touching it gives you the razor, the cold water, the small private satisfaction of a clean line along a jaw that everyone else's father had stubble on by noon. His nose is next, and that one comes with a memory that has weight to it: eleven years old, a pickup game, an elbow he never saw coming, the way it never quite grew back straight and how he stopped minding around fifteen, decided crooked was just what his face did now.

Then the room gives you people instead of things. A girl's laugh from somewhere past the door — Marisol, home from her shift, dropping her bag by the couch, calling his name like it's a question she already knows the answer to. Warmth comes with that name, uncomplicated, still new enough to be exciting. And underneath it, quieter, another name he doesn't say out loud anymore — Priscilla, six months gone, a goodbye that happened over text because neither of them had the stomach for it in person, a hurt gone dull but not gone. His leg starts bouncing without him — without you — asking it to, a tremor at the knee that's apparently just what this body does when it's still, has done it since before any of this, since before Marisol, since before the nose broke. Sunday Mass memory flickers by, his mother's elbow in his ribs to sit up straight, incense and candle wax, a wish maybe made in worse places than a fogged mirror.

You feel eighteen in the tendons, in how fast the blood moves, in a body that has never once had to think about its knees on stairs. It is, you notice, a good one. Better than Todd. Better than most of the eight hundred and twenty-two.

You look down. The hands are darker than any hands you've worn in a while, knuckles scraped pink from a day's work, a callus riding the base of each finger like a second skin. You turn the right one over, study the crook of the last knuckle where a hammer must have caught it once, watch it not be yours and be yours at the same time.

You look up into the mirror, into the clearing stripe of it, into his own crooked-nosed face looking back changed.

"There," you say, to no one, in his voice, "wish granted."