Devin Ashby

Marcus Davis's mop bucket is halfway across the break room floor when the wheel in your head starts turning again, faster than the wheel on the screen ever could. You've been him thirty-nine seconds. Thirty-nine seconds of this back, these knees, the smell of bleach that's already in the fibers of the uniform shirt, and something in you — the thirty-sixth passenger this body's had in its own short life, though it will never know — already can't stand it. Not the poverty, you've had poverty before. It's the quiet. Two a.m., a locked school, a mop, fluorescent hum, nobody's voice for six more hours. You didn't come here for quiet. You open the site on the cracked phone in Marcus's pocket — his phone, his data plan, his $11 in checking — and you spin anyway, because you always can, because somewhere a card is waiting to be drawn and you have never once, in thirty-six tries, been able to let it sit face-down.

You land mid-stride in a parking lot that smells like rain on hot asphalt instead of bleach. Halogen and neon — pink and green light bleeding across a wet curb. A shirt collar loose at your throat, headphones cold against the back of your neck, a phone heavy and warm in your right hand. Your left hand is already moving, already halfway to the top of your head, a habit finishing itself before you've caught up to owning it — like the body knew where it was going and you're just riding the last half-second of a motion he started. You almost miss the step down off the curb. You catch it. You are standing very still in the drizzle, in Devin Ashby's black cargo pants, in front of a sign that says ASTRO GAMING CENTER, and the shift he was walking back from — or toward — hangs in the air like a held breath.

The ring is first. Left hand, plain gold band, and it comes up warm and sudden and whole: a courthouse in June, his wife Renata laughing because the officiant's phone kept buzzing during the vows, her hand shaking putting the ring on him because she was more nervous than he was for once. That one's easy, that one's good, and you let it play all the way through — the reception was six people and a bag of takeout crawfish in her mother's backyard, and he cried during a toast he wasn't supposed to give.

The headphones against your neck bring the desk. Not this parking lot — the rig at home, three monitors, the ring light that makes his skin look better than it does under this sodium glow, chat scrolling past faster than a human eye should track and him tracking it anyway, a joke landing, forty people typing the same laughing emoji in the same second and something in his chest going warm and stupid and grateful every single time, four nights a week, going on six years now. The metrics that never quite add up to a real income. The way Renata doesn't ask about the numbers anymore, not because she stopped caring, but because she learned which questions make his leg start going under the desk before he even answers.

The phone in your hand — his phone — gives you the leg itself: sitting, always sitting, knee jackhammering under a desk since he was nineteen years old and a therapist finally gave the thing a name and a small orange pill that helped enough to matter. Gives you 2 a.m. thoughts he doesn't share with the chat, the quiet models he takes at half past four in the empty gaming-center parking lot after closing down some rando's PC station for cash, headphones down around his neck instead of on, because the drive home is eleven minutes and he likes the elevens minutes he isn't performing anything for anyone.

The shirt gives you the morning — his morning, hours and a whole timezone behind wherever you started, because he sleeps when the city sleeps and works after, and pulling this shirt on had been the last ordinary thing he did as only himself: left arm first, favoring it out of habit though nothing's wrong with it, the fabric already soft and thin from four years of washes, a band tee from a show he saw with his cousin before the cousin moved to Austin and they stopped really talking. He'd looked in the mirror for exactly as long as it takes to decide a shirt is fine, which is not long, and then he'd gone to find his keys.

You feel all thirty-three years of him settle at once — an athlete's ease that never got used on anything but a desk chair, calm hands that know a keyboard the way Marcus's hands knew a mop, and under all of it that leg, restless, already going, like it never got the message that the shift you were doing is over now.

You look down at your hand. Turn it over. The ring catches the pink neon and throws it back small.

"Renata's gonna ask why I'm standing in a parking lot talking to myself," you say, out loud, to no one, to the wet lot, to the sign buzzing its A.

You don't know if you're staying for the drive home. You don't know if you're staying for the ring light, chat scrolling, six years of Thursdays. You don't know anything except that the leg under you is already bouncing, on its own, the way it always has, whether or not anyone's driving.