Frank Dombroski

You are Zayd Halabi for three more minutes, standing in his kitchen — which is really the kitchen of a house you bought with money you never worked for — and the mail on the counter is the reason. Foreclosure notice, second one, the bank's language gone from polite to procedural. Zayd's "investments" are a story he tells at dinner parties; the truth is a man who spent four years living off a settlement that is almost gone, and tonight the number finally sat down across from him and would not leave. You liked being young. You liked the nose, crooked from something Zayd never talks about, and the stubble, and the easy 5'10" of him. But a body that's about to lose its house is a body you're done wearing. You open the site on his phone, in his kitchen, still wearing his hands, and you spin.

The fork is an inch from your mouth and then it is not moving, and neither are you — for a half-second there is only the smell of the container, something with gravy in it, and the specific ache of feet that have been on concrete since five a.m. Then you are behind these eyes instead of your own, and the fork comes down onto the counter with a small, deliberate click, like someone else's hand set it there, which it was.

You shrug the coat off one shoulder at a time — it's heavier than Zayd's jackets, canvas, a delivery patch stiff on the chest — and it falls half onto a kitchen chair, and that's the first thing that gives you anything: the weight of it swinging, the smell of van exhaust and cardboard in the collar, and suddenly you're not in this kitchen at all, you're at 5:47 a.m. pulling this same coat off a hook by the door while Donna is still asleep, and you thread your arm through the sleeve the way you have four thousand mornings running, elbow first, shoulder second, a motion that doesn't need you to be awake for it.

You sit. The chair knows your weight before you do — it's been holding this exact 5'6", this exact gut he's a little embarrassed by, for eleven years. Your knees crack the way they always crack, cartilage worn down from a hundred thousand steps in and out of a truck. Your right forearm brushes the table edge and the half-sleeve tattoo lights up a memory whole and unbidden: a shop in Bay Ridge, 1994, a friend who's dead now, the buzz of the needle and the stupid pride of it, tribal because everyone was doing tribal, and Donna laughing at him for a week straight and then tracing it with her finger every night for a year after.

The wedding band clicks the container as you pick the fork back up, and that's Donna too, all at once — twenty-six years, the two of you broke as hell at the courthouse, her sister crying more than either of you did. Three kids who are not kids anymore, one of them a mother herself now, and Frank paying for none of it easily, the number in his head every single night that he never says out loud, the number that is the reason his shoulders sit the way they sit. He is deep under and has been for years, second job that fell through, a brother-in-law's business that ate money like a fire. He doesn't tell Donna the whole of it. He prays to something that isn't the church he was raised in — she got him into a circle of women who read cards and burn sage and he went along skeptical and stayed for reasons he can't explain even to himself, some quiet under the noise of the number.

You eat in his even mouthfuls, looking at the black window, and the toothpick habit surfaces even though there's no toothpick — your jaw works at nothing, muscle memory of a mouth that's chewed a thousand of them down to splinters on a thousand loading docks. The moustache moves when you chew; you can feel it, absurd and entirely his.

And under all of it, quieter, is Liam — twenty years old, dimples, three days ago you were him, three houses down, and Frank has waved to that kid across a fence for years without knowing what you know: that you've stood inside both of them, that you shoveled Liam's walk in a body that wasn't yours and now you're eating dinner in the body of the man who lives next door to him. Neither of them will ever know they've both been rooms you passed through.

You set the fork down in the empty container. You look at your hands — thick knuckles, a scar you didn't earn crossing one eyebrow above eyes that aren't looking back with any of Frank's worry — and you turn the left one over slowly, the ring catching the window light.

"Didn't think I'd miss being young," you say, to the dark glass, to no one, "but here we are."