Donald Kerrigan

The afternoon is nothing, which is why you're finally doing it. Gray light through a window you don't describe, a screen you've refreshed too many times, and that same tab open for a week because you weren't sure you believed it: vessel.cards. A wheel, rendered clean and slow, like it's not asking you for money so much as permission. You've wanted this since before you could name it — every story you read twice, every film you paused on the wrong frame, the two-in-the-morning threads about waking up in someone else's weight. Nobody sells that. This one does. You pay. You spin. The wheel does the thing wheels do, and somewhere in the spin your afternoon just — stops being yours to finish.

It doesn't feel like falling. It feels like arriving in the middle of a sentence.

You are on your side in the dark. A phone six inches from a face that isn't attached to anyone you are — it's attached to you now, hazel eyes catching the blue glare, a thumb stopped mid-scroll on something forgettable. The room smells like nothing and everything, laundry and a woman's night cream and a faint animal smell of a house that's slept in every night for decades. Your thumb — his thumb — starts moving again. Faster. Steadier than the stop it interrupted. The light holds on the face and the face has quit blinking on schedule, and nobody sees that, because it's early and dark and there is no one awake to notice a man forget how to blink like himself.

Then the rest of him comes in through what you're touching, because that's the only door there is.

The phone first: cheap glass case, a crack along one corner he keeps meaning to fix, and it gives you a flash of two teenagers — not teenagers anymore, one at a college three states off, one home and sullen and twenty-four — texted last week and never answered. Guilt, small and old, filed away like a bill he'll pay eventually. The mattress under your hip gives you thirty years of a woman's shape worn into the other side of it, her breathing the sound he falls asleep to more than any music, an anniversary dinner at a steakhouse off the Strip that he oversalted the joke on and she laughed anyway. Married. Still married. Still, somehow, glad of it at four in the morning with his back turned to her sleeping.

The t-shirt against your back is the last thing he put on before bed — no, wait, it's not bed at all it's supposed to be, and the wrongness of it arrives with the shirt: this is a nightshift body confused about its own clock, except tonight he swapped with a guy on the crew and slept through what should've been a shift, and the phone-scroll is what a grown man does instead of admitting he can't get back down. Under the shirt, the shoulders: still strong from twenty-some years of hauling cans off a truck's back step in the Nevada dark, forty pounds at a time, the specific ache that lives in his lower back and never fully leaves, a right knee that clicks on the stairs, blood pressure medication in a little amber bottle on the nightstand he is not touching but somehow still remembers swallowing dry last night because the glass was empty.

Further back, deeper, unbidden: the exact motion of pulling on the coveralls this same morning-that-wasn't, one arm and then the other, zipper caught once on the reflective tape and freed with the practiced flick of a man who's done it four thousand times, gloves already gray-yellow with a season's grime, boots that know the specific give of the truck's back step under them before his feet do. A route he could drive with his eyes shut. A supervisor he likes fine. A coworker, younger, who calls him "Old Donnie" with no malice in it and gets a shove for it anyway. None of this is dramatic. All of it is his, worn smooth with repeating.

And the ring — plain, gold, on the hand still holding the phone — gives you a wedding thirty-some years gone, a woman in a dress he still remembers the color of, a vow that this comfortable unspectacular life, casino-adjacent, always slightly nocturnal, would be enough. It was. It still is, humming under everything like a second pulse.

You feel all of it land in a body that is not tired the way you expected — sixty-four and still built like something load-bearing, a wandering left eye that drifts a half-degree outward and has for years, hazel eyes that have seen four decades of Vegas dawns from the wrong side of sleep.

The thumb stops. You lift the hand off the phone and turn it over in the blue light, palm up, seeing the calluses that aren't news to it, the ring catching what little light there is.

You look up into the dark, toward where the ceiling is, and say, out loud, to no one awake to hear it:

"Well — good morning to me."

Nobody answers. The wife sleeps on beside you. Somewhere a wheel is still spinning in an afternoon that isn't this one, and you don't know — you refuse to know — how long you get to keep being the man whose hand this is.