Derek Amano

It is a Tuesday where you are, nobody awake, and the fascination you have carried for years — every film about waking up in someone else's skin, every thread you read at two in the morning wondering what it would actually feel like — finally has a price tag on it. vessel.cards. You did not believe it would work. You paid anyway, because the evening was nothing, because you had scrolled through everything else already, because this is the one door you have wanted opened since before you can remember wanting anything else. You spin.

The kerb is under one foot and not the other, and the catch of your palm against a car door is already happening when you arrive in it — cold glass, wet under your fingers, the give of a denim sleeve at your wrist. His body takes the stumble and finishes it for you, knees absorbing what the drink had loosened, and then you are standing, and the scuff that had been dragging every third step simply isn't there anymore. Forty steps, even and quiet. At the corner, you turn left. It is not the way home. You don't know that yet. Neither does he, and he never will.

The jacket is open and the night is thick and wet-hot the way only a summer night in Atlanta gets, air like a held breath, and the denim against your forearms brings the first flash: a thrift store in Decatur, some Saturday years back, the jacket forty dollars less because a sleeve was mis-stitched. He wore it anyway. Wears it still. Pride in that, a small stubborn one.

Your hand finds the lighter in your pocket without you asking it to — his hand knowing before you do — and it flips open, shut, open, a motion worn so deep into him it happens under any thought at all, and it brings a porch, dusk, a cigar going soft and orange between his teeth, someone's laugh off to the side that isn't there anymore. An ex. Christine. Three years gone and the shape of her voice still comes loose from the leather lighter case like smoke let out of a room that's been shut too long. You feel where that sits in him — not sharp anymore, just present, the way an old bruise announces weather.

The shirt is cotton, cheap, brown, and it remembers itself being pulled on this morning — his morning, hours and hours behind this one, sun already ugly over the cul-de-sacs, the van's AC broken again, the delivery scanner heavy and stupid on his hip all day. Muscle memory surfaces with the fabric: reaching, scanning, reaching, forty pounds up three flights, forty pounds back down, the practiced economy of a compact, strong body that has done this exact motion ten thousand times and expects to do it ten thousand more. Legs that carry more muscle than his height would suggest. A back that knows how to lift without asking permission from a mind that's elsewhere.

The tattoo on his upper arm — a dagger through a rose, ink faded from noon after noon in short sleeves — gives up a year all at once: nineteen, broke, sitting in a chair in a shop off Buford Highway, grinning through the sting because his cousin dared him and he never once let a dare sit unanswered. That kind of pride runs under everything else in him, quiet and constant, the thing that gets him up for six a.m. shifts and keeps his boots laced tight even drunk at two in the morning three Mondays into a stretch nobody else wanted.

Under the joints, a low persistent hum you almost mistake for the drink: his blood running high again, the diabetes he manages badly on nights like this one, the thirst that isn't really thirst. His feet ache pleasantly the way a body's do after ten hours of use. He is thirty-five and strong and a little worn at the same time, and both are true.

You look down. Your hand — his hand — turns over under the streetlight, scarred faintly at one knuckle, lighter still warm from the flip, and you watch it like it belongs to somebody you're about to be introduced to.

Your eyes come up into the dark, past the shuttered storefronts, and you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice and not the one you don't have anymore:

"Well — that's new."