Donald Kaminski

Kevin Struzik's apartment smells like the inside of a delivery van, and three minutes in his skin is already three minutes too many. You feel the dad-bod softness of him, the ache of a knee that carries a body built for a job he clocked out of forever the second he became yours to walk around in, standing at his own kitchen counter at six in the morning in New York, phone propped against the toaster, the wheel already loading on the screen. It isn't boredom exactly. It's that Kevin's whole life fits in your palm like a stone you've already skipped across the water — there is nothing left in him to find, and finding things is the only reason you do this. You set his phone down, pick up your own, and open vessel.cards, because a body that has stopped surprising you is worse than no body at all.

The wheel spins. You don't watch it land. You never do — the landing isn't yours, it's the world's, some Sunday-morning stranger's turn to stop being anyone.

The blue light is already on your cheek when you arrive, thumb moving over a phone six inches from a face that isn't yours yet but is about to be all you have. The scroll doesn't slow down — it speeds up, smooth and sure, flicking past a photo of a dog, a headline about the county fair, a paused video of a woman laughing that the man underneath you had been looking at for eleven seconds before you arrived and will never look at again. The room is dark. A window unit hums. Somewhere under the covers a foot is bare and cold against the sheet.

The shirt is what opens first — a soft gray T-shirt gone thin at the collar, and through it comes a whole Tuesday: pulling it on after a shower that never gets the coal dust fully out from behind the ears no matter how long you stand in it, the smell of Irish Spring and diesel that never quite leaves a miner's skin. Donald Kaminski. The name arrives with the shirt, plain as a nametag. Fifty-seven years old, and the body underneath tells you before anything else does — a low burn behind the sternum that never fully goes out, decades of acid finding its way up in the dark, a bottle of Tums somewhere in this nightstand he reaches for without looking. The knees are fine. The knees are the one part of him that held. It's the shoulders that ache on cold mornings, and it's cold in Ohio in whatever month this is.

The phone in his hand gives you the ex — Denise, three years gone, a name that still makes something in his chest tighten before he can stop it, a woman who left when the mine cut back to four days and he stopped being able to hide how scared that made him. The wedding band on the other hand, cool and thin, gives you Carol, twenty-six years, her laugh in a kitchen that smells like pierogi on Sundays, the two of them going quiet-mad together over their son's truck payments and their daughter's night shifts at the hospital in Youngstown. Two kids, grown, gone to their own apartments, and Donald and Carol still in this bed most nights not touching but knowing exactly where the other one's feet are.

The tattoo comes last, faintest of all, because it's the oldest thing on him — an anchor on the inner forearm, ink laid down by a boardwalk artist in Norfolk forty years back when Donald was nineteen and Navy and certain the ocean was where his life would happen. It faded the way certain lines do, the way promises to yourself do. He ended up two hundred miles from any coast, a cage dropping him half a mile into the dark five days a week, a headlamp on a helmet instead of a horizon. He clicks a pen when he's thinking, always has, some tic from a foreman job he never got, and even now, holding a phone instead of a pen, his thumb finds the same rhythm on the screen's edge — click, click, click, an old habit with nothing to click.

It is Sunday, and this is the strange hour of him, sleeping in past dawn on the one day the pit doesn't call him down, and even that is a small mercy his body registers before his mind does — the softness of not-yet-having-to-move.

You look at your hands — his hands, blunt-fingered, a paler line where a glove sits every day the sun doesn't reach, the ring catching what little light the phone throws. You turn one over like it might tell you something the touch hasn't already.

"Carol," you say, quiet, to the dark room, to nobody, "you awake?"

No answer. Just the hum of the window unit, and the wheel already loading somewhere behind your eyes, patient, waiting for whenever you decide Donald Kaminski has told you everything he's going to.