Gary Petrosino

The wheel spins for a long time before it stops. Longer than you expected, given how little you paid — but you're not thinking about the price. You're thinking about the years of this: the threads at two in the morning, the films you rewatched for one scene, the dumb persistent hunger to know what it would feel like to be someone else, actually be them, not imagine it. Tonight there was nothing on. There's never anything on. You found the site the way you find everything, half by accident, half because some part of you had been looking for it for a decade without knowing the words to search. vessel.cards. A wheel on a page. You paid. You spun. You did not expect it to do anything at all.

It does something.

There is a couch under you that is not a couch you know, and a can in your hand, warm, nearly empty, and a television throwing pale blue light across a room you've never stood in. Your head is heavy in a way that isn't yours — heavy with sleep, with hours, with a body that has been up since before dawn and is still up, technically, at an hour when it should not be. The game is running a second replay of something. A ball. A cheer, muted, from a stadium that finished this play minutes ago. Your thumb — his thumb — finds the volume button with a small, exact competence that has nothing to do with how much he's had to drink.

The shirt against your back tells you first. Green, thin, worn to softness at the collar — and with it comes a morning, sleeve by sleeve, his arms lifting it overhead in a bedroom with the blinds still down, his wife's shape still under the covers, not stirring. He'd put it on quiet. He always dresses quiet when the alarm goes off that early, three-forty, three-fifty, some ungodly number that used to feel like violence and now just feels like Tuesday. Coffee in a thermos with a dent in it. Boots by the door already laced from the night before because his fingers don't want to deal with laces at that hour.

The can in your hand gives you the version of tonight that came after: home at some hour past decent, the shift wringing him out the way it always does — eight, nine, sometimes ten hours of stairwells and other people's couches, a mattress wedged sideways through a doorway that should have been measured better, a kid's dresser that took two men and a bad word to get down a flight of stairs in Silver Lake. His shoulders know this. They ache low and specific, the kind of ache you stop mentioning to your wife because she's heard it for twenty years and it stopped being news a long time ago. His knees know it too, a duller thing. His hands are the strongest part of him — thick through the palm, sure on a strap, sure on a doorframe, sure on the small of a mattress in a way that has never once dropped a piece of somebody's life on the way down the stairs.

The ring is the last thing that opens, small and plain and warm from his skin. Her — Diane — twenty-two years of her, the shape of an argument they had in 2009 that isn't really over, the shape of a Sunday that is. And under that, quieter, a girl from before her, a name that still has a corner of him nobody talks about, not guilty exactly, just there, the way an old bruise is there. Two kids, grown enough now that the house is emptier than he planned on it being. A job he didn't choose so much as fell into and stayed in because the money's fine and the work is honest and there is something in him that likes knowing, at the end of a day, exactly what he moved and where it ended up.

He fell asleep mid-game, mouth open, can going warm in his hand, because a man who's up at four in the morning has no business also being up at eleven at night, and he knows it, and he did it anyway. Somewhere else, hours behind him, it's just starting to be morning. Here it's the dead middle of his night, and the room is dim and blue and smells like carpet and old couch and the particular staleness of a house where everyone else is asleep.

You look down at the can. At the hand around it — his hand, wide, sun-marked, a plain gold band catching the TV light.

You turn it over once, slow, like it might not be real, like it might still be someone else's.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, to the empty room, to the second replay still running silent behind you. "Okay."

You don't know how long you get to keep him. Nobody does. The wheel doesn't say, and you're not done wanting to spin it again.