Dennis Whickerham

Sione's chest rises slow under your borrowed lungs — his lungs, seven minutes his, and you already can't stand the fit of him. The dimples are wrong on a face that isn't smiling. The heat of Rural Texas presses through a window unit that's losing the argument, and somewhere out past the yard a dog won't quit barking at nothing. You spun for muscle last time, for youth, for something with a body that could take a hit and shrug it off, and now you're sitting on the edge of a stranger's bed in a stranger's town with his phone charger cord wrapped twice around your — his — wrist like a bracelet, and none of it is interesting anymore. Seven minutes was long enough to learn this one's whole appeal was the photograph. You want the site. You want the wheel. You always want the wheel, that's the thing nobody on the outside would understand, and there isn't anybody on the outside anymore, there's just you and the 903 men behind you and the itch that never once, in 904 spins, has waited politely for a good reason.

You open vessel.cards on his phone with his thumb. You pay. You spin.

—

The thumb is already moving before you've finished arriving, faster than its owner had it going, flicking through a feed it isn't reading, and you're lying on your side in the dark with a phone six inches off your nose and a bed under you that smells like fabric softener and someone else's sleep. Blue light on a cheek that isn't the one you had a second ago. No unibrow-heat, no beard-itch yet — those come a half-second later, the way a room comes into focus. The scrolling slows, then stops. You are lying very still, getting your bearings inside a body that is long and thin and tired in a way that has nothing to do with the last seven minutes.

The room outside the phone's light is almost nothing — a shape of a dresser, laundry over a chair, a window with the blinds down against a sky that has already gone all the way dark. Evening here. Late enough. You register, distantly and with someone else's body clock, that this is wrong for the hour it should be and right for the hour it is — Denver's already deep in its night while Rural Texas was barely getting there, and some sense that isn't yours, that's already bleeding in from the mattress under your hip, knows exactly why: nights. He works nights. That's why the bed still has body-warmth in it at an hour when a normal man would be watching television.

The wedding band is the first hard fact your hand finds, cool metal circling a finger that isn't used to being touched by you. It gives you nothing at first — bands don't talk, not right away — but you're holding the phone now with intention, and the phone gives you everything.

*Warehouse.* The word arrives whole, with the smell of it — cardboard dust, hot motor oil, the particular cold of a loading dock at four a.m. Aisle 14, then 9, then 22, a scanner gun weight settling into your palm like it's been there your whole life, because it has, five years of it, the barcode chirp so worn into you that you hear it now, phantom, under the AC hum. Your feet ache in a specific, permanent way — not injury, just miles, thousands of them walked on concrete in boots that are good boots, boots you bought because your feet couldn't take the cheap ones anymore. Your shoulders know the particular hunch of pulling totes off a top shelf you're a little too tall for and a little too skinny to leverage easily. Skinny — that's true too, you feel it now, the leanness of a man who eats on schedule but not much, whose strength is all in tendon and repetition, none of it for show.

The phone itself opens wider. A photo you'd stopped scrolling on, hours old feeling, days old feeling — a woman's face, laughing at something off-camera, and the feeling that comes with her isn't romantic anymore, it's careful, it's *managed*, it's a name you get in fragments — Carrie — and a string of texts you don't read but feel the shape of: she moved out four months back, there's a couch she left, there's a silence in the apartment where her laugh used to be, and it still catches him some nights, this exact kind of night, alone with the phone because the wife is asleep in the other room and this is not something you tell your wife you're thinking about.

That lands harder than it should — *wife*. The ring again, warmer now that you know what it's holding down. Her name comes slower, gentler, like it doesn't want to be handled roughly: mornings with her, a version of this same bed with actual light in it, her hand finding yours under the blanket without either of you waking all the way. Church on Sundays, the kind where people know your name and ask after you, a folding chair in a gymnasium and a sleeve of donuts and a feeling under your ribs that you'd call peace if anyone asked you to name it, which nobody ever does, because that's between you and God and you keep it there.

The sweatpants against your legs remember themselves being pulled on this morning — evening, for him, the start of shift-eve, a cardigan tugged over a shirt already soft from washing, one arm then the other, unhurried, because the shift doesn't start for hours yet and this is the good part of the day, the nothing part, the couch-then-bed part. There's a bottle of NyQuil on the nightstand he doesn't touch anymore because the drinking stopped years back, quietly, without a program, just a decision made alone in a truck one night and kept. No cigarette smell in the room either — quit that too, longer ago, and the lungs under your borrowed ribs are cleaner for it, easier, though they still remember wanting one.

The unibrow. You feel it without a mirror — the weight of it over his eyes, the one feature strangers' eyes always catch on half a second before the rest of his face, and it doesn't bother him, hasn't in a decade, it's just his, the way the barcode chirp is his, the way the cardboard smell is his, the way Carrie's laugh in a four-month-old photo is a small quiet ache that is also, somehow, his.

Your thumb stops on the screen. The scrolling has nowhere left to go that means anything.

You look down at the hand holding the phone — his hand, long-fingered, a callus at the base of the trigger finger from a scanner gun that isn't even here tonight, the band catching the last of the screen's light — and you turn it over once, slow, like checking it's real.

Then you lift your eyes off it, into the dark of the room, and you say, quiet enough not to wake anyone down the hall:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."