Deven Sethi

Sami Haddad's calves are still warm from a training run that isn't yours, standing in a kitchen in Phoenix that smells like someone else's protein shakes, and you are already bored of him. Twenty-two, built like a closed fist, a body that runs and runs and never once gets tired in a way that interests you. Five hundred and two men behind you and this one lasted less than a minute of actually being decided on — a good body, a wasted one, because the only thing you can think about, standing in his kitchen with his phone still warm from a call you didn't take, is the twenty-nine minutes since you were small and quick and hazel-eyed in rural Texas, wearing a man named Rayaan for sixteen good minutes, and how you never got to meet the brother.

You open the laptop. You pay. You spin.

The kitchen is gone, and the argument you were about to lose is gone, and there is a cheap flaking table under your forearms and a chair that creaks and a laptop screen with a woman's face frozen mid-blink in the corner. Your body — his body — is already leaning forward into the light of it, spine loose, mouth open on the last half of a word that was never finished. The room smells like dish soap and something fried a few nights back. Late enough outside the window that the overcast has gone the color of a bruise healing. You sit up. Dead center in the frame. "Hey — hey, can you hear me?" you say, testing a voice you did not choose, into a face on a screen that isn't listening, hasn't been listening, frozen there mid-blink like it's waiting for something to start again.

The flannel is the first thing. Worn soft at the elbows, a button gone at the cuff, and touching it gives you an evening — him getting dressed for this call twenty minutes ago, pulling it on over a white tee because his girlfriend likes this one, likes the green in it against his eyes, and there's a small dumb pride in that, in being chosen for a shirt. Under it his chest is narrow, a runner's negative — no, not a runner's, just skinny, always has been, mother used to put extra on his plate and Rayaan's plate both and it never went anywhere on him. The scar through his eyebrow comes with a bicycle and a curb and being nine years old and Rayaan laughing before he understood it was blood, then Rayaan not laughing, Rayaan's hand flat and hard against the cut to stop it, which is maybe the whole shape of what they are to each other in one memory.

The mouse under your palm is warm from his hand a second ago, and it gives you the app — a stupid thing a friend sent, some new video call gimmick, and the small buzz of loneliness underneath trying it out on a Friday night alone rather than admit he had nothing else lined up. The girlfriend on the screen, frozen, was supposed to be the whole evening. You feel, underneath, the flatness that has a name and a pill bottle for it in the bathroom cabinet upstairs, the one he takes without thinking now, the way you clicked a pen without thinking a hundred times a day back when this hand was a hand that belonged to someone paying attention to it.

The earring is small and cool where it drags your attention every so often, a fourteenth-birthday thing, done in a mall kiosk while Rayaan — sixteen then, already fast, already the one people watched — held his hand and told him it would hurt for a second and then not matter. You know that hand. You wore it twenty-nine minutes ago. You threw a ball with it, or something like a ball, in heat that had nothing to do with this gray Boston window, and there is a strange doubled vertigo in remembering a brother's hand while sitting inside the other brother's chest — like standing between two mirrors and finally seeing the hallway they make together.

The sneakers under the table, laces gone soft and gray, remember a whole autumn of a campus lawn, laptop balanced on his knees, an ordinary unremarkable afternoon that felt, at the time, like his whole life was made of afternoons like it and would go on being. Money is thin — the loans, the part-time thing at the library, counting out for coffee like it costs something, because it does. None of it is much. All of it is his.

You look at your hands on the table. Long fingers, chewed thumbnail, a faint tremor that isn't nerves, just a body that runs a little hot all the time. You turn the right one over like you're checking it's real, like some part of you is still expecting Sami's knuckles, or Rayaan's smaller ones, and getting these instead — pale, thin, a stranger's hand doing exactly what a hand does.

You look up into the frozen half-blink of the girlfriend's face, and past it, through the little dark lens above the screen, and you say, "There you are" — to no one she can hear, to the version of you that's been circling this family for half an hour now without meaning to, and you don't know yet if that's an ending or a beginning.