Dennis Kowalczyk

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Marco's kitchen is quiet at this hour, the way San Francisco is quiet before six — fog against the window instead of light. You are standing at the counter in his body, thirty-seven years old, silver hair still flat from the pillow, and you are holding his phone in his hand, looking at a calendar full of things Marco was going to do today. A 9 a.m. He had a 9 a.m. It doesn't matter what it was for.

You have been him less than a minute and already the wanting is back, already the itch under the dimples that aren't yours, in a face that isn't yours, doing a life that was never going to be yours past this morning. That's the thing nobody who hasn't spun tells you: the new one goes stale on arrival, sometimes. Five hundred and eighty-one times and you still don't know, walking into a body, whether it'll be a year or four minutes. This one — accountant, competent hands, a good face — lasted less than a minute, and that's its own kind of answer. You set the phone down on the counter, gently, like you're not about to abandon it mid-sentence, and you go to the site instead.

vessel.cards loads the way it always loads: patient, a little smug, the wheel already spinning lazily even before you touch it, like it knew. You pay. You spin. You don't watch it stop, exactly — you're not sure anyone does, the seeing and the leaving happen in the same instant — and then Marco's kitchen is gone.

*

There is toothpaste foam on your lip and a brush going back and forth over a molar that already got its turn, because the motion doesn't know yet that it's yours now instead of his. The water is running into a white sink. You are looking at a mirror with a man in it you have never seen before — dark hair with gray coming in at the roots, a hard line clipped into the sides, dimples cut into his cheeks even though his face is doing nothing at all — and the eyes in the mirror blink once, slow, taking a full second longer than a blink should, and something in them changes from empty to occupied. You finish the stroke on the back teeth, unhurried, because the body already knew how to do that and you're only riding along for the last of it. You rinse twice. You stand the brush up bristles-first, out of grey water that has sat in that cup, undisturbed, for years longer than you've existed in here.

*

The shirt is the first thing that talks to you. Not the toothbrush — the shirt, gray, thin at the collar, and through it comes a whole morning: him pulling it over his head forty minutes ago in a bedroom with the shade still down, Linda's breathing even and slow behind him because she works the closing shift at the pharmacy and Mondays are the one day she gets to sleep past seven. He'd stood there in the dark a second before dressing, not thinking about anything in particular, which was its own kind of peace. The plaid pants next — flannel, soft with age, an elastic waist that has been let out once already at a tailor's on Belmont who didn't say anything about it, which he'd appreciated more than he let on.

The wedding band is the loud one. Left hand, plain gold, thinned a little on the underside from twenty-two years of pens and wrenches wearing it down from the inside. Linda. Not a flash but a decade: her laughing at something at Manny's diner under the tracks, the rattle of the Brown Line going over while they talked, her hand flat on his chest at 2 a.m. some anniversary he's forgotten the number of, telling him the gray suited him better than the dye ever did, and him getting the dye anyway because it was easier than arguing with himself in a mirror every morning about getting older. And under that, closer to the surface than he'd want anyone to know, a name: Renata. Younger. Six months gone from his life and still showing up at odd hours — not guilt exactly, more like a splinter that healed over with the wood still in it. He'd ended it clean, he told himself. Linda never found out, he told himself. Both of those were mostly true, which is its own kind of true.

The floor tile under your bare feet is cold and known — every mechanic's foot knows how to stand, weight rolled slightly outboard, twenty years of concrete garage floor teaching a body to save itself where it can. Your back has the particular low ache of a man who has spent three decades bent into engine bays, and your hands — thick through the knuckles, a old burn scar he doesn't think about anymore on the left forearm under a tattoo he got at twenty-three and regrets the placement of more than the ink — already want a pen to click, want a rag in a back pocket, want something to do besides stand still at a sink. The dad-bod gut pulls at the gray shirt in a way that used to bother him more than it does now. Fifty-five does that. It also does the good thing: knees that still work, a back that complains but doesn't quit, dimples that show even when his face is doing absolutely nothing, which Linda once said, half-drunk on their tenth anniversary, was the reason she married him — that he looked like he was about to laugh even when he wasn't.

Middle of the morning here, tap still running, the L rattling somewhere outside on schedule. He should be at the shop. There's a Civic up on the second lift with a bad CV joint and Ray covering for him for twenty more minutes before he starts wondering. None of that is going anywhere. It'll sit exactly where it is, the way Marco's 9 a.m. is sitting on a counter in another city, waiting for someone who isn't coming back to it.

*

You shut off the tap. You look down at the hand holding the edge of the sink — the ring, the burn scar, the tattoo going soft and blue at the edges — and you turn it over slow, like you're checking it's really attached.

Then you look up into the mirror, into hazel eyes that aren't yours yet and are now, and you say, to nobody, to the glass, to the version of you that already knows it won't be forever:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."