Danny Reyes

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to sit with the decision. A wheel, plain as a raffle drum, spinning slots you can't read until it stops. You have read about this for years — every thread, every found-footage fake, every story about waking up in a stranger's life — and always the same ending, that it wasn't real, that nobody had actually built the door. Then somebody built the door. Middle of the night, nothing on, the kind of tired that isn't sleepy so much as loose. You pay. You spin. It stops.

There is no falling, no tunnel, none of the things you imagined for it. There is a bedspread very close to your face and the smell of fabric softener and a voice — his voice, but you are already inside where it's coming from — trailing off on the word *amen* a half-beat too early, like he clocked out before the sentence finished. Your knees are on a mattress. Your hands are laced together, loosely, like two people holding hands who aren't trying very hard. You started to rise. You don't. You come back down onto both knees instead, and the smile that was on his mouth a second ago goes out like someone found the switch, and your forehead drops onto the bedspread, and you breathe there, once, twice, in lungs that aren't the ones you don't have.

Then the room starts arriving in pieces, the way a radio finds a station.

The bedspread under your forehead is cheap and cool and it gives you, unbidden, a whole apartment — small, new-build beige, a lease he signed alone eight months ago because his girlfriend's name wasn't on anything yet, because his name barely covers what it needs to. The nightstand clock reads a time that doesn't belong to the light in the window, and that wrongness comes with its own small ache: he works late crews some weeks, sleeps through mornings, prays at the hours other people eat lunch, and nobody thinks it's strange because everybody on a Dallas framing crew keeps a schedule like a held breath, up before the heat, down before the heat again.

The t-shirt is what really opens him. Gray, soft from a hundred washes, and putting it on this morning comes back whole — pulling it over his head still damp from the shower, the collar catching a second on his chin, one arm through the sleeve then the other, quick, practiced, a body doing something it has done ten thousand mornings without asking permission from the mind riding it. Boots by the door, laced tight in a doubled knot he learned from his father, who is not a fact you were given and so is only a shape, a hand teaching a smaller hand a knot. Calluses along the base of each finger, hard little disks of skin that don't feel anything now, pressed into each other in prayer. A hammer's weight that isn't in his hands right now but is somehow still in them anyway, muscle memory sitting there like a held note.

He is twenty. His shoulders carry that specific ache of a body still finishing itself, strong already, sore in the good way, freckles dusted warm across a nose that's gotten more sun than sense. Sawdust ghosts the back of his throat even here, even now, a permanent low tickle. Somewhere behind the prayer is the number — the number he doesn't say to his girlfriend, the number that sits on him heavier than any stud wall he's ever framed, tens of thousands deep, a hole he prays about more than he'd admit, which is maybe part of why he was on his knees at all, hands loose, not trying that hard, getting to the amen early like he wanted this part over before it could ask anything more of him.

He believes it, mostly. Not hard. Not the way his mother believes it. But enough that kneeling isn't nothing, that amen isn't nothing, that some quiet channel in him keeps trying even when his mind's already standing up, already halfway back to the truck, the tape measure, the crew waiting on him under a Dallas sun that doesn't know or care what a man owes.

Then that channel goes quiet. Because you're the one on the line now.

You lift your forehead off the bedspread. You look down at his hands — tan across the backs, pale at the palms, one thumbnail gone faintly purple from a bad Tuesday with a framing hammer three weeks ago that isn't yours to remember but somehow already is. You turn the right one over slowly, like it might not hold still for you.

"Huh," you say, out loud, in his voice, to the empty room. "Okay."

The clock on the nightstand doesn't change. Somewhere a girlfriend is texting a man who isn't going to answer the way she expects. Somewhere else, wherever you actually are, it's already tomorrow and nobody there knows you've left at all. You don't know how long you get to keep the calluses, the number, the amen said too early. Nobody built that part of the door.