Dustin Pelfrey

You are Colin Tavernier for sixty more seconds, standing in a kitchen that is not yours, in the grey nothing-hour before a Thursday starts, and you already know it was a mistake. Not the body — the body is fine, soft in the gut, hair thinning at the crown in a way you keep touching without meaning to — but the life. Lesson plans on the counter in handwriting you don't own. A mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST TEACHER, someone else's joke, someone else's kitchen, someone else's whole exhausted year stacked up in a life you walked into a minute ago and already want out of. There's a rhythm to a person you can't fake and can't stand wearing badly. So you set the mug down un-drunk and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, because a minute is long enough to know you'd rather be new again than be bad at being him.

The wheel turns. There is no in-between.

You come up crouched, weight low and balanced over your own knees in a way this body has done a thousand times without asking permission, one arm extended into the open mouth of a dryer, sock warm and damp-dry between two fingers. Fluorescent tube buzzing white overhead. Concrete cold enough to feel through socked feet. You pull the sock free, drop it in the basket with the rest, and your hands — his hands — keep going without you: shirt off the drum, folded once, folded again, corner to corner, squared and stacked before you've caught up to the fact that you're doing it.

Then it comes in through what you're holding, the way it always does.

The shirt first — grey, soft from a hundred washes — and it brings the morning he put it on, sleeve by sleeve, half-asleep, the trailer still holding the day's heat even at that hour because High Desert nights don't cool a single-wide the way they cool the sagebrush around it. Dustin's mornings are backwards from everyone else's: shift starts when the world's going dark, and he dresses in a kitchen lit by one bulb, TV murmuring to nobody, girlfriend already asleep down the short hall. The clothes on your back come with the smell of the warehouse baked into the fabric — cardboard dust, machine oil, the particular cold of AC fighting desert heat — and under that a whole year unspools: the scanner strapped to his wrist like a second watch, the aisle numbers he doesn't have to think about anymore, the beep of a forklift he's learned to place without looking, how far he'll get in ten hours and how his lower back will let him know about it by hour six.

The concrete under your feet gives you the basement — not his, the building's, shared with three other units, and the mismatched detergent smells of neighbors he's never met. This body is twenty-three and already carries a little of both directions age can go: doughy through the middle from shift food and no time, but the forearms are wire, the shoulders know how to lift a case without thinking, the knees crack going down and don't complain going up. Nothing hurts exactly. Everything is a little tired all the time, the specific tired of a young body running on a schedule the sun doesn't agree with.

The dryer's warm metal edge gives you Marisol — not her name yet, just her, laughing at him for folding towels like he's being graded, the smell of her shampoo the one time she stayed over even though the walls here are thin as paper. Dating nine months. Nothing dramatic. She likes that he's steady. He likes that she doesn't ask him to be anything else.

The vape in his pocket, when your hip brushes it reaching for the basket, gives you three years of doing this exact thing at this exact hour — vaping on the back step before shift, the sky doing something enormous and purple over sagebrush that goes on forever, a quiet he's stopped noticing is beautiful because he's had it his whole life. Spiritual about it in a way he'd never say out loud: something out there bigger than the trailer, bigger than the warehouse, bigger than the paycheck that never quite covers the month. He doesn't go to church. He doesn't need to. The desert is enough of one at four in the morning.

Nothing about him surprises you. That's the strange, plain mercy of him — no story worth a headline, no wound worth naming, just a guy folding laundry at the wrong end of the night because the alarm doesn't care what time your body thinks it is.

You straighten up out of the crouch. Your hand — his hand — goes to the top of your head on its own, running flat over the curls before you even decide to let it, an old unconscious tic that isn't yours and now is.

You look at it after, turning it palm-up under the buzzing light like it might tell you something the touch didn't.

Then you lift your eyes to the dark window over the machines, where your own reflection is the only thing looking back, and you say, quiet, to nobody who's listening:

"Okay. Who are you, then."