Emiliano Vasquez

The screen has been doing this to you for an hour — the dull animated wheel, the pulsing SPIN button, the little disclaimer in grey nobody reads. Outside your window it is the middle of a Tuesday, bright and uneventful, the kind of day that asks nothing of you. You have wanted this since you were a kid watching bodies swap in movies, since every late thread about waking up as somebody else, and now there's a card reader and a price and a wheel that actually spins. You don't let yourself think about it any longer than you let yourself think about anything you want badly. You pay. You spin.

The fork is halfway to your mouth and then it isn't moving, because you are the one deciding whether it moves, and you don't yet know how. For a fraction of a second there are two sets of instructions fighting over the same hand — his, finishing a bite, and yours, just arrived, not knowing the weight of a fork or the give of a plastic container or the fact that the coat is still on, a small damp heat gathering at the collar. The fork comes back down. It sets itself on the counter with a sound too loud for how light it is. You feel a kitchen around you that isn't a kitchen you've ever stood in — strip lighting through a window turned black, a pendant lamp throwing yellow over the counter, everyone else in the apartment, in the building, in the city, asleep. It is the middle of the night here. It was the middle of the day where you were a second ago. You shrug the coat off like you've seen it done, except you haven't, his shoulders have, ten thousand times, and the motion arrives correct without you asking for it.

You sit. You eat the rest of the container in even mouthfuls, because that is what the hands want to do and you let them, and while you do, he starts arriving.

It comes in through the coat first, draped now over the chair back under your knuckles — a late shift, a lab closing down around him, the particular ache of standing at a bench for six hours running assays for a professor who forgets his name every other week. Then the fork, still slightly warm from his hand: Sunday dinner at his mother's, competing with his younger cousins over who gets the last tamale, her laughing and smacking his hand with a spoon, the dimples he didn't ask for and can't turn off even when he's trying to look serious in front of a professor. The counter under your forearms is cool granite, rented, not his, eighteen months into a lease split with a roommate who's never home. Under your feet the floor remembers being barefoot here at 2 a.m. plenty of times before, that's a comfort the body holds separately from the mind, a groove worn into a life.

More comes, unbidden, layered. A girl named Camila, the current one, asleep right now across town, who texted him a photo of her dog in a Halloween costume four hours ago and he never answered because his phone died at the lab. Before her — before her, there's a name that still catches somewhere in the chest when it surfaces, Daniela, two years of her, ending badly enough that he still flinches a little walking past a particular taco truck. That feeling isn't yours but you feel it anyway, borrowed and real, a small bruise you didn't earn.

The shirt against your back — under the hoodie he isn't wearing right now, but the shirt he put on tonight before his shift — gives you the morning in pieces: him sitting on the edge of a mattress at 6 p.m. like it was 6 a.m. for him, pulling a plain grey tee over his head one sleeve at a time, already dreading the long walk across a humid parking lot to his car, keys warm from sitting all day on the windowsill in the sun. Twenty-one years old, and the body under all of it is exactly that — quick, a little sore in the lower back from standing too long, shoulders that know how to carry a backpack loaded with textbooks without thinking, forearms with the specific toughness of someone who worked outdoor jobs in high school before this one. Calluses along two fingers from gripping pipettes wrong for years nobody corrected. Faint grit of five AM gym sessions he keeps promising himself he'll get back to.

You chew. You swallow. The window in front of you holds nothing but your own reflection now, dark glass turning the kitchen back at itself, and in it there are dimples even though the face isn't smiling, because they never really go away.

You look down at the hand holding the fork. It turns over, slow, like you're checking it for something that isn't there — and you lift your eyes up into the black glass, into the version of him looking back out of it.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the window, to whatever is listening. "Okay. I'm you now."

You don't know for how long. You don't know when the wanting comes back, when some other screen on some other ordinary afternoon starts pulsing at you again. For now there is just the container, empty, and the quiet, and his mouth saying words that aren't his anymore.