Dominic Hruska

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films, the old stories, the threads at two in the morning where strangers swap theories about waking up as someone else. It has always been a private fascination, and it has never once been for sale. Tonight, if you can call it tonight, is nothing. The day is half spent, the scrolling has gone stale, and there is nothing on. Then the page with the wheel on it. You pay because you do not believe it. You spin because the paying is already done.

The wheel clicks, slows, and lands.

Streetlight, orange, through a gap in curtains. You are face-down. The pillow is damp against your cheek and your breath is ragged, catching on something in a dream you are not in. Then it evens out, as though you steadied it, and the arm that hangs off the mattress draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back and your hands fold at the chest, a posture he has never once slept in. He does not know. There is nothing left of him in here to know.

The weight of him is the first thing. Heavy shoulders, a lower back with a dull ache that has been there for years, a left leg that wants to bounce even lying down.

The sheet is cotton, worn soft, and under your fingers it gives you something: a hand-me-down set, bought in a hurry the week of the move, and her laughing that they were the wrong blue. Then it is gone.

Your thumb finds the ring. It spins easily, a little loose in winter. A courthouse, a cold day, her coat the color of a pigeon. He cried before she did and was embarrassed about it. That embarrassment arrives in you whole, and it is warm.

The gray T-shirt at your ribs. He put it on in the dark, after the shift, without turning on the lamp so he would not wake her. Left arm first. He always goes left arm first. His knuckles are scarred with a hundred tiny burns, and they know how to hold a torch without being told. Your fingers curl around nothing, around the memory of a stinger and the hiss of gas.

The plaid pants, flannel, soft at the knee. A Christmas gift. Under them the mattress shifts, and you feel the other side of the bed, empty, cool, and a small cold fear comes up that is his. The money. The loan, the truck, the house worth less than they owe. He lies awake doing arithmetic that never lands anywhere. His leg bounces under the blanket as it always does, as if the sum could be shaken loose.

Your tongue finds the gap in your front teeth and with it comes a girl in a kitchen, years back, before the wife, before any of it: the old girlfriend, who used to put a fingertip in that gap and call it a doorway. He has not told anyone he still thinks of her sometimes, kindly, with no wish to go back. It is the only thing in him that is only his. Now it is yours, and you feel like a thief.

Over the sternum, under the collar, the skin feels tight, and with it a name in script and a date. Their daughter. He had it done the week she was born, shaking, because the needle did not hurt and he hated that it did not.

Your breath goes out slowly. The room smells of dust and radiator heat and, faintly, of burnt metal in his hair.

You lift your hands from your chest and hold them in the orange light. Broad palms, cracked at the creases, a plain band, a faint burn mark pale across one thumb. You turn them over. They are yours. They are not.

You look up, and your voice comes out low, with his gravel in it.

"Okay. Okay, so it's real."

Somewhere under the question is the next one. How long. Whether the wanting comes back tonight, or in a year, or in four minutes, and whether you wake up still him.