Gordon Mah

You are standing at the end of a shift in a stranger's body, and the body is wrong. Brendan Cullity, twenty-two, a picker in a Boston warehouse. His thumbs are sore from the scanner trigger. His beard itches in the heat of the loading dock. He has been yours for one minute.

You have been looking at the pick list for the whole minute. Aisle 40, bin C, a case of dog food, then another, then another. Nothing is wrong with him. His back is young, his knees don't complain, and his lungs go all the way down. You wanted the wheel again anyway. It was not boredom. It was that his phone lit up in his pocket and the name on it was one you did not know how to answer, and every answer you could think of was a life you would have to keep. So you paid, and you spun.

The wheel ticks down and the dock disappears.

Heat first. It is wet and heavy, and it sits on your face like a hand. Water is running over your sneaker. Your right hand is closed around something soft and sodden, and your left holds a hose that bucks with the pressure. Soap is sliding down a car door in front of you, and your arm is halfway through an arc.

You do not stop it. The arm already knows the rest.

The shirt comes first. The cotton is thin and soft from a hundred washes, and it clings damp between your shoulder blades. A flash arrives, and it is his and not yours. A morning, closet light, the hanger scraping the rail. He takes the grey-blue tee because it is the one nobody sees him in. Right sleeve, then left. He is a man who wears a lanyard five days a week and has earned a shirt with no name on it.

The sponge is rough on one side and slick on the other. Through it comes a mezzanine walkway, steel grating under his shoes, the whole distribution floor below him humming. Forklifts beep like patient birds. He stands above it with a clipboard and a pen, and the pen clicks, click, click, under his thumb, and he does not know he is doing it. Your thumb is doing it now, against the sponge, and finds nothing to click.

The concrete is warm through the soles. You get a Saturday on this driveway, years back. A woman laughs and flicks suds at him, and he is thirty-nine and sure of something. Then the same driveway on a different afternoon, a boxy silence in the house, a ring turned off his finger and set down on a kitchen counter next to the mail. You look at your left hand. The skin there is a pale band, a little shiny, where the ring used to sit. It still feels it, a ghost of pressure. He misses her in the way you miss a stair that isn't there.

A cigarette, long ago, behind a loading bay, the first drag at nineteen. A drink he stopped pouring. Money sits quietly under it all, a number he has never once said aloud.

The jeans hold his weight. He is fifty-six and carries it low and soft around the middle. His lower back has an opinion and his right knee grumbles. His hands are broad and steady, and they know exactly how hard to press on a panel without scratching it. All afternoon he has been working the soap in wide circles, a habit of his father's. The sponge changes in your grip. You tuck your thumb. You turn your wrist in small tight circles, and the door gleams clean behind it.

You let go of the sponge and look at your hand. It is not yours, and it is not even close to Brendan's. It is wet and warm, with a pale ring of skin on the finger.

You look up. The garage is dim and the evening is thick with insects.

"Well," you say, in a voice lower and slower than the last one. "Hello."

The hose keeps running over your shoe. You do not know how long you get to keep this.