DeShawn Ollie

Frank Delacroix's hands are good hands, big and steady, and they haven't shaken in sixty-five years of use, but right now they're shaking a little over the laptop, because you made them type in the card number twice. Retired, athletic, a corner office once, a condo now with a view of the lake he never learned to love — and none of it matters, because twenty-three minutes ago you were somebody else. A mail carrier. Small, wiry, red hair going copper in the sun, a nose broken once and reset wrong, a walk-up in the Outer Sunset with a dog that wasn't yours to love and did anyway for the length of a heartbeat. Patrick. You wore him for less than a minute — barely time to feel the ache in his knees from the route, barely time to close a hand around the leash — before the wheel called you back to Frank, and Frank sat down in his leather chair by the window and could not stop thinking about the dog, and the leash, and a phone on the kitchen counter with a lock screen of two men laughing on a beach, and a name in the contacts that was not the man he'd almost been. A best friend. Saved with a heart next to it. That's what sends you back — not boredom, not greed exactly, just an itch under skin that isn't yours anymore, the shape of an unfinished room you glimpsed through somebody else's window and now can't stop wanting to walk into properly. Frank's thumb finds the wheel on the screen. It spins the both of you toward Friday afternoon somewhere else, though it's already evening where Frank's lamp is on.

The power drops for two seconds in a shop in Dallas, and the needle stutters against skin gone very still, and when the light comes back the arm has stopped flinching.

You are sitting down. Heavy in a way Frank never was — a different gravity, hips and shoulders that carry more of themselves, thighs pressing wide against a tattoo chair with brown vinyl gone soft at the seams. Your forearm is braced on a padded rest, green soap pooled in a shallow well of skin, and a needle is still moving in someone else's gloved hand, walking a line into ink that was already there. You do not pull away. You watch it like it's happening to furniture, because for one second that's exactly what it feels like — this is a body, only a body, and then the body starts talking to you.

The chair against your back says gym, twice a week, less lately, and a groan low in the lumbar spine that's been there since a bad squat two years ago and never fully left — DeShawn's back, a dull hot wire along one side whenever he sits too long, which is now. The black t-shirt against your shoulders is one he pulled on this morning without thinking, the same three shirts on rotation because laundry is a Sunday thing, and under it the memory of pulling it over his head is right there, sudden and whole: him standing in a bedroom with the blinds still down, humming something with no words to it, easing the shirt down over a chest and belly that took him a while to stop apologizing for and now mostly doesn't. The cargo pants at your legs remember a subdivision driveway an hour outside downtown, a pickup with a cracked mirror parked behind a Honda that isn't his, a mother inside the new-build house who used to work two jobs to get them into it and still can't quite believe the mortgage is real. MOM, EST. 1980 on the back of one hand — you feel that one arrive like a struck bell, her laugh, her hand flat on his cheek at his graduation, the sting of getting it done at nineteen because he wanted it where he'd see it every day, not hidden. On the neck, smaller: a date, 10-24-02. His own birthday inked into his own skin, which sounds strange until the memory comes with it — a boy who almost didn't make it, early and small, and a mother who told that story so many times it became his to carry too, so he carries it visibly.

The needle against your forearm right now is finishing something for someone else entirely — not a new memory, an old ache surfacing, the boyfriend's name half-joked-about last week, this one's not for him, don't worry, and DeShawn's own laugh at that, easy, a little shy. The boyfriend: two years, gentle, a little boring in the good way, texts back too fast, loves him loud in front of people which DeShawn is still getting used to. And under that, quieter, not gone: a man from before, Marquis, who left for Houston with an apology DeShawn still knows by heart, the one whose name is not on this arm and never will be, the one who taught him what wanting somebody feels like before he had words for any of it. The backpack strap you're not currently wearing but remember anyway — a campus lawn, laptop warm on his thighs, an economics reading he keeps meaning to finish, a girl two blankets over who calls him by name like it costs her nothing, which still, twenty-one years old, feels like a gift.

The tattoo artist says something you don't catch. The machine lifts.

You look down at your hand. It is broad, the knuckles a little ashy, MOM inked crooked on purpose because he did it himself the summer he turned nineteen and didn't trust anyone else's hand near his mother's name. You turn it over once, slow, the ache in your lower back settling into the chair like it's always lived there, and you lift your eyes to find the little ring light and, past it, whatever's holding still enough in this room to look like a lens.

"Man," you say, low, almost fond, like you're talking about someone you used to know, "I look good."