Dennis Whitlock

You have been at the screen since the light went out of the afternoon, doing nothing. Scrolling, and then scrolling past what you scrolled. The evening is a flat gray thing with no edges. Then the page with the wheel on it: vessel.cards. You have wanted this since before you could say why. Every film where a stranger wakes up in a stranger's skin, every thread at two in the morning, the long private hunger of it. You never believed anyone could sell it. You pay. You spin.

It lands, and you are standing.

Barefoot, on carpet that is coarse and cool. A lamp throws amber across a room that smells of dust and old air conditioning. A phone sits in your right hand, the glass lit with a button that says ACCEPT, and your thumb is already above it. The light flashes white, stays on your face too long, and then the glass goes dark. Your arm lowers it. Your breath is slow, a sleeper's breath, a belly's weight riding on it. It is the middle of the night. Everyone asleep. Why is he up?

The shirt hangs soft against your ribs, washed thin, and the cotton gives you him: a bathroom, a thumb scrubbing a coffee stain at the hem. He was embarrassed about the stain. The jeans are stiff at the knee, and you get a flash of a gravel lot, a truck bed, his father-in-law laughing. The carpet under your toes is the motel's, not a trailer's. A dim memory slides in. The trailer's swamp cooler broke, the wife and the kids are asleep at her sister's, and he took a room so he could sit up and work on a client's logo without the noise. Pinned color swatches on a wall he is not looking at. The money is always short. He prays about it, quietly, at the edge of beds.

Your fingers curl and the knuckles crack, all on their own, one after another, a habit older than the marriage. The ring is a plain band that has worn a groove in the finger. Touching it opens her: a kitchen, her laughing at his terrible singing, three small heads at a table. Then the other one, the woman who got away, a porch light and a screen door he never went back through. It aches in his chest, and under the collar the tattoo of a face sits against the skin. You press it with two fingers and feel a grief with no edges, a portrait he got for someone he lost. His calves are tight. His lower back complains where he sits too long at the tablet. He is forty-four, short, soft in the middle, and the body feels used and decent. Somewhere in the hands is a ten-year-old cigarette he quit, still a ghost between the first two fingers.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The palm is lined and unfamiliar and yours. Then you look up, and your voice comes out low, a little rough.

"Okay. So this is real."

Four minutes or four years. The wheel is still there, waiting behind your eyes, and you do not know how long he stays.