Devon Ashby

Walter Pruszynski's hands smell like the fryer even at this hour, even scrubbed twice, even standing here in his own kitchen at two in the morning while the rest of the flat sleeps through a Monday that isn't going anywhere. Sixty years old and the small of his back has already told him no, more than once, about the rest of tonight. You have been him for one minute. That is enough. You did not spin the wheel to find out what it's like to be tired.

You open the laptop instead. The site loads the way it always loads, plain as a receipt, the wheel sitting there patient as a slot machine that never asks why. You didn't come back for boredom, exactly, and you didn't come back for the money, though God knows Walter's tip-outs aren't going to buy anything. You came back because five days ago you put down a man named Marcellus Deering — six-foot-three, a nurse's gentleness in a linebacker's frame, gray at the temples, a laugh that came up from his knees — and you left him mid-sentence, mid-shift, and you have not stopped thinking about the coworker he used to complain about over coffee in the break room, the young one, the photographer moonlighting on nurses' schedules he didn't have. You remember the name the way Marcellus said it. Fondly. Like a habit he couldn't shake.

You spin because you want to go back into that world through a different door.

The wheel turns. It stops.

—

The leash goes slack in your hand and you feel the whole evening arrive at once: the heat still coming up off the sidewalk, a beagle nosing a hedge like it's the only story in the world, and a body under you that is nothing like Walter's — younger by decades, tight through the shoulders, a shaved head still warm from the day's sun. You wind the leash twice without meaning to, some old grip your hand already knows, and step off at a pace the dog has to scramble to match.

It's the leash that gives you the first flash — rubber and grip-tape under fingers that have held this exact strap four hundred times, walked this exact dog down this exact block, a small ordinary fondness you didn't ask for and get anyway. Then the shirt. Black cotton, worn soft at the collar, and dressing this morning comes back whole: him pulling it on in the gray predawn light of his apartment, the courtyard palms not yet moving, mind already three shoots ahead of his body — a headshot session at nine, a favor for a friend at noon, the reflector he never put away leaning against the stucco where he left it. His name arrives with the cargo pants, worn in at the knee from crouching for angles: Devon Ashby. Twenty-two. The tattoos on his forearm come alive under your own stillness — script, a name, a date, his mother's, inked the year she went into remission the first time, the year everyone thought the good news would hold.

The dog's leash again — a name, *Biscuit*, and underneath it the sharper thing: an ex-girlfriend's laugh in this same courtyard, her hand that used to reach down to scratch behind these exact ears before she didn't anymore. Six months gone and Devon still walks the dog at this hour some nights because the apartment is too quiet otherwise, because a leash in his hand is easier than a phone.

You feel the drink before you understand it — not tonight, but the ready-built ache of it, a body that already knows what four beers feels like walking home from a wrap party, knows what it costs the next morning, knows enough to be almost-worried about it, in the vague spiritual way of a man who prays sometimes without calling it that. High blood pressure sits in him quiet, a doctor's voice from six months back saying watch this, and Devon not really watching it.

And Marcellus. The coworker. You feel it the way Devon feels it — genuine, unbothered, a co-worker's coworker, someone he shot a favor portrait for once and got a decent nurse's paycheck of a compliment in return: *you got a gift, man.* Devon doesn't know Marcellus is missing from his own life right now, five days and three hours into being replaced by nothing at all. He only knows the man was kind to him once in a hospital cafeteria, waiting on someone else's test results.

Your hand — his hand — keeps moving without you, fingers hunting for a lighter that isn't there, a habit worn into muscle that has nothing to do with cigarettes and everything to do with having something to do.

—

You stop on the sidewalk and look down at your own hand, turning it, the ink catching the streetlight funny — no, porch light, late sun gone now to nothing, a Monday midnight in a city that keeps its clocks separate from the one you left. Biscuit sits, waiting, unbothered, the way dogs are when the only thing that changed is something they can't smell yet.

"Hey, Marcellus," you say to no one, to the empty hedge, to the dog, "small world."

You don't know how long Devon gets. You never do.