Farid Mansour

You are Tyler Brandt, and you are standing in a stockroom aisle of a store that has been closed for hours, a box cutter in your right hand, a pallet of canned corn at your knee. Nine minutes. That is how long he has been yours. The beard is itchy. The blue eyes see everything in the fluorescent hum and none of it interests you. There is a beauty mark under the left eye that you keep touching with your tongue, as if it were a tooth.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He is twenty-five and his back doesn't hurt and the work is easy, and you stand there with a can in your palm and feel the not-wanting arrive, the old itch that sits under the sternum. You open the site on his phone with his thumb. The wheel is already turning before you decide.

White. Then the dark room, and a different weight.

You are sitting back in a couch that has taken the shape of someone else. The television is the only light, and it has just cut to a bright frame; you sit up straight, and the remote, which was loose in your right hand, you set down on the arm. The room smells of cold tea and carpet and something fried hours ago. Your left leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. It goes on, heel against the floor, in gray socks gone thin at the toe.

The couch fabric is rough under your forearm, and the roughness opens something. A different couch, a girl's laugh at his joke, her feet in his lap, years ago. He loved her. He still does, a little, like a bruise he presses to check. The feeling is his and it fits strangely in your chest.

The hoodie cuffs are pushed up. You pull the zipper tab and he remembers this morning: the sleeve, the left arm first, because his right shoulder clicks. The lanyard over his head, the badge that says he is a voice on a headset, eight hours of *thank you for calling*, people shouting at him about bills. He says sorry nine times a shift and means it six. The badge is still around your neck, cool plastic against the T-shirt. He fell asleep sitting up, he comes home and cannot go to bed, the night is the only part that belongs to him.

Your thumb finds the pad of a tattoo on the inner wrist, black tribal lines he got at twenty-two for no reason he could defend now. Under it, a prayer rug rolled in the corner of his closet; the shame of how rarely it comes out, and the fierce small gladness of the times it does. He has never touched a drink and doesn't miss it. He has less than five thousand dollars to his name and knows it to the dollar.

His body is compact and strong, forty years old, thighs hard from a gym he still goes to out of stubbornness. The knees register the couch. The scalp, buzzed, feels cool air on it. When you rub it, the stubble prickles under your palm.

You lift your hands into the screen light and turn them over. They are brown, scarred at the knuckle, entirely unfamiliar. The leg keeps bouncing.

You look up. You say, quietly, in his low voice, "Okay. Hello."

On the screen someone tells a joke, and you don't laugh. You wonder how long you get to be him, and whether the wanting will wait until morning.