Emiliano Cabral

Colin Tarwater's hands smell like other men's scalps, bay rum and clipper oil worked so deep into the creases it never washes out, and you have been him for three minutes and already you are bored of it in a way that feels like an itch behind the sternum. Broad shoulders. A chair he owns outright, no debt on it, a life so square and paid-off it barely has a shadow. You spun for him last time out of curiosity and the curiosity is already spent. It is the middle of a Wednesday and the shop smells like a shop and someone's beard trimmings are on the floor and there is nothing here you want, so on your break, blond head bent over a phone that is not yours, you open vessel.cards again and put in the card that is also not yours and you spin because a paid-off life is the dullest thing the wheel has ever handed you.

The wheel gives you a highway at night, rain starting, and a car that is not drifting so much as being drifted — a foot toward the line and then a smooth correction, both hands coming off the wheel and settling lower and wider, like a driver adjusting his grip after a long stretch of road, except the hands doing it are not deciding anything. Yours now. Skinny wrists. A ring catching the dash glow. The turn signal clicks on, green arrow pulsing, for an exit sign reading FOLLOM RIVER MARINA, and you have never heard of Follom River in your life, and neither, you understand a half-second later, does anyone in this body, because it isn't his exit either.

The denim jacket is against your back first, worn soft at the elbows, and it opens onto a Tuesday two winters ago, thrift store on Nostrand, Emiliano turning in front of a cracked mirror while his wife Marisol laughed and said it made him look like somebody's uncle from a photograph, and he bought it anyway because she laughed. The wedding band bites faintly at the base of the finger where the wheel gripped and it brings the whole church basement reception back at once, folding chairs, her cousin's terrible speech, her hand cold from the punch bowl finding his under the table. The half sleeve on the right forearm is warm under the sleeve, tattoo ink over old skin, and touching it — just the pressure of shirt cotton against it — gives you Chivas winning a nothing match in extra time, his father's television, seventeen years old and screaming into a couch cushion so he wouldn't wake the block.

The leg. It's already going, has been since before you arrived, bouncing against the floor mat on its own errand, a habit so old it isn't nervousness anymore, it's just what the leg does, the way some hearts skip a beat for no reason. You feel how thin he is under the denim, how light, no weight to throw around, hands that have learned to hold a laptop open on a lawn with the same care they'd hold a beer, careful hands, a careful man. There's a backpack strap ghost still on one shoulder even though the backpack isn't here — the muscle remembering a Tuesday routine, campus grass, tuition he is drowning in and does not tell Marisol the real number of, a number that sits under everything he does now like water under ice. Twenty-eight and going back to school on loans that will outlive the loans he already had. Sleep apnea machine waiting on a nightstand in a Brooklyn walk-up he will not reach tonight the way he meant to, hums in his memory like a second engine.

The birthmark on the jaw — you don't touch it, nothing does, it's just there, warm skin no different from any other skin to the man wearing it, though the whole rest of the world has spent twenty-eight years noticing it first. It gives you nothing when you finally register it in the mirror's edge except the small, old, tired flash of every stranger's eyes sliding to it before they slide to him.

You look down. Skinny hands, a wedding band, a birthmark reflected wrong-way in the side mirror glow, rain starting to fleck the windshield three miles from a home he is not going to sleep in tonight the way he thinks he will. The dash clock reads a New York hour that doesn't match the hour behind you in Philadelphia, and for a second that seams wrong in your head, like a stitch pulled crooked, before you let it go, because it isn't your problem, none of the hours ever are.

You turn the hand over once, watching the ring catch the light.

"Not tonight," you say, to no one, and you leave the signal blinking toward the marina exit a while longer before you decide.