Gary Fessenden

You have been up too long, and the apartment is that particular quiet that only exists at three in the morning, when even the refrigerator sounds like it's trying not to wake anyone. You found the site the way you find everything now, by falling sideways through the internet until something catches. Vessel dot cards. A wheel, rendered slow and heavy, like a roulette table dressed for a funeral. You have wanted this since before you knew there was a word for wanting it — every movie where two people swap places in the dark, every forum thread you read at an hour like this one, half-believing, all wishing. You didn't think it would take the card. It takes the card.

The wheel spins for a long time, longer than it needs to, and then it stops on a man you have never seen and never will meet as yourself.

The fluorescent tube is what hits first, that thin buzz behind the eyes, and then the warmth — dryer heat, coming off a sock held in a hand that is not your hand but is now the only one you have. Knees complaining. A basement smell, detergent and concrete and something faintly of rust. You are crouched, and the door of the dryer is open like a mouth, and the load inside is done, and you are the one who has to finish it.

It comes in through the sock first, absurdly — the terrycloth against calloused fingers, and something surfaces that isn't yours: the particular satisfaction of a matched pair, socks the same in the dark for thirty years because you buy them all the same and never have to think about it, and thinking about not having to think about something is somehow already a kind of company. You pull the rest of the load into the basket, warm and tangled, and your hands — his hands — go to work without asking you, folding fast, corners squared, a rhythm laid down over decades of laundromats and rented rooms and a woman's voice a long time ago saying you fold towels wrong, and this is how you fold them now, forever, because of her.

The shirt on your back gives you the morning. Grey T-shirt, a little thin at the collar, and you feel him — Gary — pulling it over his head in a house on posts with the windows already up because the trades haven't come in yet and the air sits on you like a hand. The tin roof ticking as it heats. He'd stood in his kitchen with coffee going lukewarm, looked at the eight shirts crumpled in the drawer like they'd fought each other overnight, picked this one because it didn't smell like creosote yet. There's a soreness that lives permanently across the low back and down through one hip, the specific toll of forty years climbing ladders and kneeling on hearths and reaching up flues with jointed rods that fight you the whole way, and some mornings it's a2 out of 10 and some mornings it makes him sit on the edge of the bed a minute longer than he needs to. Today was a 4. It is always something.

The tribal tattoo on the upper arm comes up warm from an old memory of a tattoo parlor in '89, a dare, a friend now twenty years dead of something quieter than a fire but just as final. The ring is not on a finger — it's not there right now, socks and laundry don't call for it — but your hand still wants to reach for where it would be, out of habit, the way his hand does at the sink, at the wheel of the truck, anytime there's nothing to hold. Diane's ring, technically, given back a decade ago and never quite let go of, sitting in a dish by the bed most nights, on his finger some days for no reason he's told anyone. She left for reasons that made sense to her and none to him, and there's a whole quiet year in there you could live inside if you wanted — the calls that stopped, the phone he kept charged out of habit long after — but the dryer's still humming and there isn't time and this is the part of him you'll come back to another day, maybe, if there is one.

His back complains gently as you rise with the basket. Dad-bod weight settled low and comfortable, the kind that came slow and stayed. Blue eyes reflected nowhere in this windowless room. The buzzed hair under your palm when you scratch at your scalp, an old unconscious tic, skin and stubble alike.

You look down. One sock, still not put away, sitting in your palm like it doesn't belong there — because it doesn't, not to you, not yet, not really.

"Whose hands are these," you say out loud, to the humming light, to no one, and it isn't really a question, because you already know the answer is going to be his for a while, and you don't know how long a while is, and there's a wheel out there that will spin again whenever you decide it should, and tonight — his night, this one, this warm ordinary Wednesday evening — is not going to be the night you decide that.