Devin Achebe

You have been the bouncer for one minute, standing at a door in a town where the bars close early and the cold comes down off the lake like it means something personal. Karan Bhatti's feet ache in boots two sizes too honest about how far he's walked in them today. His jaw does the thing his jaw does, working at nothing, the gap in his front teeth catching air. You didn't take this body to feel his boots or his jaw. You took it forty minutes ago on the way out the door of somebody else's life, and already it isn't enough — one minute in and the itch is back, the one that isn't his, the one that followed you here from Karan and from the man before Karan and from a hundred and seventy-three men before that. You are not tired of him. You have not had time to be tired of him. That's the ugly part you'd never say to anyone: it was never about the man. It's the spin. It's the little drop in the stomach before the wheel stops. You open the site again standing in his boots at his own door, and the wheel spins, and it does not care that you are already someone.

The kitchen arrives around you mid-stir, wooden spoon in a hand that is not the hand you just had. Warm grease-smell, a fan overhead ticking, the window above the sink gone bright with midday behind a yellowed curtain. Your — his — shoulders are wider than Karan's ever were, looser, made for a stride you haven't taken yet. The spoon keeps moving because the body's own rhythm doesn't know yet that the person running it changed. It slows, reverses, circles the other way. Salt falls into the pan from fingers that know the shake without looking. You do not taste it. Something else in you reaches instead for the cabinet, takes down a second plate, and sets it beside the first, and you don't know why yet, only that the hand did it before you had a reason.

Then his life starts coming in through everything you're touching, the way it always does — not given, found.

The spoon handle first: worn smooth on one side where a thumb rides it every time, and with it comes a kitchen that isn't only this one, an apartment two exits down the hall from this one, boxes half-packed in a doorway, a woman's laugh he can still hear better than her face. Priya. Eight months, easy in the way only a bad ending makes look easy in memory. She used to stand where you're standing and steal bites straight from the pan with this same spoon, and he'd swat her hand and she'd swear at him in Malayalam she was too proud to teach him properly, and he loved her enough that when she left for Sacramento for a job he couldn't follow, he told her it was fine, and it was not fine, and he has cooked exactly this dish — rice, beans, the cheap chicken thighs, too much cumin because that's how she liked it — probably nine times since she's been gone, and every single time some idiot animal part of him sets out two plates before his brain catches up and puts the second one away.

The shirt against your back gives you this morning in pieces: gray cotton, thin at the collar, pulled over his head while he was still half-asleep and thinking about Alana — not Priya, the one now, the one who texted him last night a photo of her cat wearing sunglasses and he'd laughed alone in this kitchen loud enough to startle himself. Alana doesn't know about the plate thing. He hasn't told her. He isn't sure he ever will, because it isn't about wanting Priya back, not really, it's about a habit his hands have that his heart hasn't caught up to firing. He'd stood in front of the mirror in these cargo pants — bought two sizes too many pockets, more than he'll ever fill, but he liked how they sat — and thought, not for the first time, that twenty feels like it should be further along than this: a shared kitchen he can't really afford alone since Priya's half of rent walked out with her, a chemistry final Thursday he hasn't opened the notes for, a heart that a doctor two years back told him, not unkindly, he should be careful with, run less, salt less, worry less, as if worry were a dial you could just turn.

His feet, bare on the cold linoleum, know this floor by every uneven tile, know the give in the board by the fridge that means don't put your full weight there barefoot at 2 a.m. His hands know the pan's hot spot without checking. He drums his fingers on the counter edge when he's not thinking, three quick taps, a tell nobody's ever called him on. He craves a cigarette right now, low and constant, the kind of want that lives under the ribs alongside the thing the doctor warned him about, and some nights he stands out past the courtyard palms with a lighter and thinks about how the pack a day and the heart thing are on a collision course he isn't in a hurry to reroute.

None of it is loud. All of it is his, and it comes to you smelling like cumin and grease and dry palm dust drifting in from the courtyard, and for a second — only a second — you feel the ache of missing someone who was never yours to miss, because his memory doesn't know yet that it's talking to a stranger.

You look down. The hand holding the spoon is a stranger's hand wearing a life like a coat that still has someone else's warmth in it. You turn it over, palm up, and watch the fingers curl on their own, restless, already starting to drum against the spoon's handle without being told to.

You look up, off the pan, into the fan-light and the empty second plate, and you say, to no one in the room, "Guess I'm still hungry."