Evan Sacharin

You're finishing a double, sitting in the break room at eleven at night in Rafael Coto's scrubs, and your feet — his feet, wide and flat and swollen at the arches — are throbbing in a way that makes the decision easy. You've had this body less than a minute of felt time, forty-six years of him in your borrowed head like a house you haven't found the light switches in yet, and already you know: nurse's feet, nurse's back, a body that aches on a schedule. You open the site on your phone under the fluorescent hum, the wheel already loaded from muscle memory that isn't yours yet either. You don't hate him. You just don't want to be tired tonight. That's the whole reason, and it's enough.

You spin.

The toothbrush is between your teeth and the water is running and you are standing at a pedestal sink you have never seen, and the strangest thing is how normal it feels, because a body doesn't announce that it's changed hands — it just goes on brushing, mid-stroke, left side, and you finish the stroke because the muscle was already committed to it before you arrived. Then you move to the other side, slower now, working the back molars, feeling out a jaw that clicks faintly on the left, a foam-taste that isn't Rafael's toothpaste, cooler, minty in a way his was not. You rinse. You rinse again. You stand the brush up bristles-first, out of habit that isn't habit yet, out of some instruction still arriving from the hands themselves.

The tap keeps running and you notice, distantly, that breathing here is different — shallower at the top, like the lungs stop a little short of where you expect them to, a tightness at the very end of the inhale that isn't pain, just a ceiling. Asthma, you'll learn the word for in a second. Right now it's only a body that measures its air.

The t-shirt against your back is thin and soft from washing, and it gives you a Tuesday in April, four years back, doing laundry at one in the morning after a gig that paid eighty dollars split three ways, standing in a laundromat on Dot Ave watching the dryer window with his eyes stinging from something that wasn't the fabric softener. His name is Evan. It arrives with the shirt the way a smell arrives before you know what's cooking. Evan Sacharin, and the tattoo on his arm — you can feel its shape without looking, the skin slightly raised under your own fingers when they brush it reaching for the towel — script, a name, a date. *Eve, 2010.* A sister. Not a girlfriend, a sister, and the year comes with a hospital corridor and a phone call and a decision to get it done three weeks later because sitting still with it was worse. That griefs settles into your chest like it has always lived there, because now it has.

The sweatpants at your waist bring back this morning — his morning, six, seven hours ago by his clock, an ordinary nothing morning, coffee standing up, no rehearsal till two, pulling these on over boxers still warm from the dryer because the apartment runs cold in October with the storm door letting draft through the porch seams. He'd stood at this exact sink at seven a.m., different water in the glass, same crooked reflection in the same mirror — the nose canted a few degrees left of true, a bar fight nobody remembers the reason for anymore, nineteen years old and stupid and now just a fact of the face he shaves around.

The guitar strap ghost is still there too, a phantom weight across the chest from soundcheck earlier tonight — a small stage, a room that smells like beer-soaked carpet and cable dust, running through the same four bars four times because the monitor mix was wrong, and under it a low simmer of missing someone: Kayla, three months gone, who used to sit at the merch table doing the crossword during soundcheck and who he still, God help him, checks the read receipts for. Nothing since September. He knows better than to hope. He hopes anyway, in the specific tired way of a man who has done this before and is doing it again.

Your knuckles ache to crack and you let them, one hand then the other, an old unthinking tic that isn't yours but is now, satisfying in a way that surprises you.

You look down at this hand — his hand, blond hair on the forearm going pale gold in the bathroom light, the tattoo half under the sleeve you rolled back to brush your teeth — and you turn it over like you're checking it for a warranty sticker.

You look up into the mirror, into hazel eyes that are yours now and were his an hour ago by his clock, a minute ago by any clock that matters, and you say, to nobody, to the fogged glass, to the tap still running:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."