Desmond Okafor

The screen has been open for an hour. Not doing anything, just sitting there in the blue light, the way Tuesday nights sit there when nothing is on and nothing wants to happen and you have already read everything twice. You have known about this pull in you for longer than you can date — the old movies where the body swaps, the forum threads at two in the morning, the specific, private ache of wondering what it would be to be poured into someone else's skin and wear it around for a while. It was always a thing you wanted and never a thing you could have. Then a link, then a page, then a wheel sitting there rendered in soft gray, spinning lazily even with no one touching it, waiting.

You pay. It does not ask why. You spin.

There is no ceremony to it, no falling, no tunnel — one instant you are looking at a wheel slowing down on a screen and the next instant you are standing on a sidewalk in a heat that has not woken up yet, and a dog is looking up at you with its ears back, and a leash has gone slack in a hand that is not stopping, has just stopped, is deciding whether to keep walking. The leash winds twice around a hand that already knows the motion, and the body under you takes a step the dog has to scramble to match. You are here. You are him. You don't know his name yet.

It comes in pieces, the way water comes through a cracked window — first a smell, cut grass and hedge and the particular dust of a Phoenix morning, and with it a flash: this same sidewalk, a year ago, a different dog, gone now, and a grief for it that isn't yours but sits in your chest like it is. The shirt against your back — thin cotton, worn soft — gives you an arm going through a sleeve in a dim bedroom before sunrise, a girlfriend still asleep with her back to the door, the quiet care of a man who doesn't want to wake her, buttoning nothing because this shirt has no buttons, just pulling it down over a stomach he is a little embarrassed by and has stopped fighting. Desmond. The name arrives with the shirt, plain as a tag.

The shorts — cargo, broken-in — bring the office: the smell of anesthetic and mint, a lamp swung down over a reclining chair, his gloved hand steady over a molar while a hygienist hands him the next tool without being asked, twenty years of that same motion worn into muscle. He is good at this. He likes being good at this. There's a name and a date tattooed in script down his forearm — his son, the year he was born — and touching the leash where it crosses that arm gives you the hospital room, fluorescent and terrified and then not terrified, a nurse laughing at something he said to cover how scared he'd been. A second script, a second date, further down: his daughter. Both kids living with their mother across town now, every-other-weekend kids, and a low steady ache about that which isn't loud but is always there, like the blood pressure medication he takes every morning with orange juice he doesn't love the taste of anymore.

There's a woman he's seeing now — Renata, six months in, easy in a way the marriage wasn't — and underneath that, still tender, still not fully closed, an ex he shared eleven years with, whose name surfaces and sits behind his teeth like something he's not ready to say out loud even to himself. Catholic guilt about the divorce that never fully went away. A drink most nights, never more than two, a rule he set for himself after watching what more than two did to his own father. He has never smoked. He touches his face without noticing — is touching it now, this exact second, the heel of his palm dragging across his cheek, a tic so old it isn't even a habit, it's just what his hand does when his mind goes elsewhere.

The dog finishes with the hedge and looks back up. The leash is in your — his — hand. Skinny fat, forty-five, the give at the middle of a body that used to be leaner and knows it, the shine of a bald scalp already warming under a sun that hasn't cleared the roofline yet. Freckles under your fingers when you touch your own nose, the one detail everyone always mentions to him and he has stopped hearing.

You look down at the hand holding the leash. Then you turn it over, palm up, like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, to the dog, to the hedge. "Okay. This is — okay."

The dog tugs. Somewhere behind your ribs the wheel is still spinning, waiting for you to spin it again, and you don't know when that will be — not tonight, maybe not for years, maybe in four minutes if the wanting comes back too fast to fight. For now there is a sidewalk, a dog, a stranger's tattoos on your arms, and a Tuesday morning that isn't yours yet but is the only one you've got.