Dennis Kowalik

The apartment is quiet the way it is every Wednesday near midnight, which is to say not quiet at all, just empty of anything that matters. The scroll goes: nothing, nothing, nothing, a photo of someone's dinner, nothing. You have had this feeling for years, the specific hunger of wanting to be someone else for even a minute, and for years there has been nowhere to spend it except in stories other people wrote. Then a link, then a wheel on a page, then a card reader accepting a number that should not buy anything real. You tell yourself it will not work. You spin anyway, because the wanting has been waiting for this exact door for longer than you can say.

It works.

You are sitting. That is the first thing — weight low and wide in a chair that creaks under it, a gut pressing warm against a shirt, a ring light two feet off buzzing white into your face so hard you have to not-quite-squint. Your mouth is already open, moving, mid-word, and you hear it come out in a voice that is not the one you have always imagined for yourself, thicker, rounder, Texas-flattened: "—and that's the thing about a lapel roll, you can't fake it with an iron, you gotta build it into the—" and then the sentence just loses its nerve. Slows. A hitch like a needle skipping a groove. Chat keeps scrolling underneath a live count that says 4, and none of the four seem to notice anything, because nothing shows on the outside that a stammer wouldn't explain.

His hand is resting on the desk beside a keyboard, tattoo showing where the sleeve is rolled to the elbow, and just touching that forearm — his own skin, plaid cuff folded back over it — something comes through like a held breath let go: standing at a table this morning, folding this exact shirt-sleeve twice, because three folds pinched the diabetic swelling in his forearm by afternoon and he'd learned that the hard way in July. There's a whole small science in it, buttons undone to the third one because the collar sits wrong buttoned all the way at his neck size now, the way it never used to. The shirt was his wife's doing, actually — she'd laid it out with the tape measure vest for the shop tomorrow, said wear the blue, it does something for your eyes, Dennis, and he'd rolled his own eyes at her doing that at sixty-one years old and worn it anyway because eighteen years married and he still liked being told that.

The chair under you creaks again as weight shifts, and shifting it, a year comes with it — the shop, Kowalik & Son except there is no son, just the name kept because his father cut suits under it and he never had it in him to paint over that, forty years of a cutting table in window light, a half-made jacket always waiting on the dummy like an unfinished sentence. The scar through the eyebrow arrives with a hand that drifts up toward his own face without being asked — that's just a thing his hands do, touch his face, always have, and the scar under two fingers gives back a summer, sixteen years old, a screen door and a dog that wasn't his fault, and his mother's hands doing the stitches wrong on purpose so there'd be a mark, so he'd remember to shut doors slow. He has, mostly.

Behind his back the office chair, ordinary, rented space next to the shop floor because someone — a nephew, a customer's kid — told him livestreaming might bring business in, and he'd laughed and said I don't even know what a livestream is and then, three weeks later, alone after close on a Wednesday because his wife was at her sister's and the house felt too big without her fork clinking her plate, he'd set up the ring light anyway. Viewer count: 4. He knew two of them. It didn't feel foolish yet. It felt, for about ninety seconds, like being young enough to try something dumb.

There is a wedding band on the hand that is now touching his own jaw, plain gold gone a little dull, and the band gives up its own small flood — a wedding thirty years back in a church that doesn't exist anymore, torn down for a strip mall, and a woman who still leaves his sugar tester on the bathroom counter where he'll see it, every morning, without a word about it, because nagging never worked but leaving it where his eyes land does.

The mouth that is his and now also yours settles, finally, back into something like his own cadence, careful, slower than before but passing for a man choosing his words. Chat has already moved on to arguing with itself about tape measures.

You look down. The hand on the desk — heavy, spotted faintly at the knuckle, a nail bed gone slightly blue-grey the way his doctor keeps mentioning and he keeps not making the appointment about — turns over in the ring light like it belongs to somebody you're being introduced to. It does. It's yours now, the only way anything is yours here: entirely, and not for a fixed time.

You lift your eyes off it and into the little black dot of the lens, past the four still watching, and you say, in his voice, quiet enough chat has to lean in to catch it:

"Sorry — folks — lost my train of thought there."