Dylan Fenwick

You are standing in a kitchen in Philadelphia, in the dark before the day, and you are Kevin Hsu, and you have been him for less than a minute. His feet are cold on the tile. The coffee machine ticks. His body is small and soft and tidy, and it works. Nothing is wrong with it.

That is the trouble. You have a pot of water on the stove and a man's whole careful life in the cabinets, labeled in a chemist's handwriting, and all you feel is the lid of it. The wheel is already open in the phone in his hand. The thumb is his. You do not look at what it costs. You press.

Then the show cuts to a bright frame and you are sitting up straight.

Dark room. A couch swallowing your back. Blue light jumping on the walls, and a remote loose in your right hand, which you set down on the arm of the couch as if it were hot. Your heart goes slow and heavy. The air is cool and dry and smells of old cardboard and a can gone flat.

The first thing that comes is the hoodie. Your left arm lies along the couch and the cuff of the sleeve is worn thin as cloth can go. Zipper teeth cold against your sternum. And it comes: a closet in the dark, one hand finding it without looking, the thought *it's late, nobody's going to see me*, and under that a tiredness so familiar to him he never noticed it was a feeling. You, in his hand, pull the zip up an inch. He did that every night.

The sweatpants are soft and cold at the knee. Your socks slide on the carpet. A flash of a driveway at noon, gravel white in the glare, a clipboard, a woman's voice saying *you're good at this, you know that?* and him not believing it. That is the job. A glass office, the door always open, people walking in to be told yes or no. He liked being asked. He did not like being the one who decided.

On the table, under the can, sit envelopes, a ring of keys, a phone, a small white earbud case. You lean and the keys are in your fingers, and the whole of a different year opens: a hot parking lot, a flag, the hard shape of a man he trusted standing next to him, boots, sand in the teeth. The tattoo on the inside of your forearm gives one faint prickle. Pride, and underneath it a grief he never said out loud. He kept the keys on that ring because the ring was from then.

A name rises off the envelopes and he flinches inside: *Marisol*. The one who got away. Not the girlfriend. She is a different warmth, a Sunday warmth. Marisol is a night in a car, rain on glass, the sentence he never said. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. You hold it a moment, a stranger's grief going through you, then let it go.

Your body, honestly: long legs, a belly that sags softly over the waistband, shoulders that slump when you stop minding them. Stubble rasps under your palm. Small studs in both ears. Your back aches from the couch. Your mouth tastes of the can. Everything works, and nothing here has ever been hard.

You lift your right hand into the screen's light and turn it over. Palm, knuckles, the faint blue of veins. His hand. Then you look up.

"Hello," you say, in a voice you've never heard, low, a little rough. You wonder how long you get to keep it.