Desmond Oyelaran

Marcus Attah's apartment smells like the inside of a locker, and the lazy eye in the bathroom mirror has stopped being funny after five spins. You stand there a long moment in his gray Sunday light, flexing fingers that aren't yours in any way that counts anymore, and you feel the specific tiredness of a body that works security twelve hours a day and nothing else. He clocked out three hours ago. He will clock in again tomorrow. Somewhere under that is a decent man who liked this life once, who you are borrowing like a coat that still smells of someone else's cologne. You are not cruel about it. You are just done. The itch that brought you back the first five times is simple and it has a name you don't say out loud: you want to know what it is to be good at something with your hands that isn't holding a door. You want, for ten seconds, to be a man who teaches other men how to hit.

You open the laptop. The site loads the way it always does, patient as a church. The wheel turns under your thumb — not literally, there's no thumb involved, just a want and a click — and somewhere a man in Brooklyn is mid-sentence into a webcam.

The frozen window catches you first: a face stalled on a blink, mouth slightly open, light from a laptop screen washing it blue-gray. Then the body arrives around you — sitting, barefoot, a cooling mug sweating a ring onto the wood by your left hand, denim-soft house pants against your shins, a sweater's wool collar at your throat. You are smaller now, lighter, folded into a kitchen chair with your spine straight out of habit. The timer on the call ticks past the freeze. You hear your own voice before you decide to use it — "hey — hey, you still there?" — testing the room for an echo, and some old reflex in the jaw and throat answers back in a register you didn't choose.

The sweater comes first, because it's touching the most skin. A Tuesday three winters back, his girlfriend handing it to him across a store counter, saying it's the color of the harbor at night, and him laughing because he doesn't know what the harbor looks like at night, he's always asleep by then, up at five to open the gym. Her name arrives like a lit window — Priya — and under it, fainter, another name that isn't supposed to still have a pulse: Noelle, the one who left for Portland four years ago and texts him on his birthday and nothing else, and how some nights he still checks whether she's online before he can stop himself. That is the thing nobody in his life knows, not even Priya, who is good to him and doesn't deserve the fraction of him that still leans west.

The chair under you remembers itself into his back — the particular ache that lives between his shoulder blades from twelve years of holding mitts up at head height for men taller than him, the cost of being 5'4" in a sport that doesn't care. The calluses along his palms aren't from punches, they're from leather straps and jump ropes and the knurled handles of the heavy bag chain, and his hands know, without being told, the exact give of focus mitts meeting a jab — turn the wrist a half-inch at impact, absorb, don't fight it. His feet are bare on the kitchen floor, and the wood remembers the floor of the gym, the particular cold of the ring apron at six in the morning before the furnace catches up.

The denim pants — he put these on an hour ago, after a shower, humming something with no tune, one leg and then the other, the fabric soft from a hundred washes, a hole starting at the left knee he keeps meaning to mend. The sweater went on over a plain white tee, both arms up and through in the mirror by the door, catching his own eyes for a second too long the way he does lately — thirty-three and starting to wonder what he's building past the gym, past Priya, past the version of himself that still sometimes drives past Noelle's old block when he has no reason to be in that neighborhood. He locs pulled free of the collar with two fingers, a small vain habit, the one thing he does for himself every morning that nobody taught him.

The call is from an old amateur-boxing friend trying some new video app, nothing important, a Sunday nothing. That's the whole shape of what you've landed in: an ordinary man on an ordinary evening, mid-sentence into a stalled face, happy in the unremarkable way of someone who has mostly stopped waiting for his life to start.

You look down at the hand resting on the table edge — his hand, green-eyed light catching the calluses at the base of each finger, a thin white scar of worn skin where mitt straps cross the palm a thousand times a year. You turn it over once, slow, like checking someone else's work.

Then you look up into the laptop's camera, into the small dead rectangle where your own face must be sitting pixelated for whoever's on the other end, and you say, in his voice, testing its volume all over again:

"Didn't catch that — say it again?"