Grant Pelkowski

The unibrow is the first thing you feel, oddly — the itch of it, a single dark line of hair over both eyes, in a garage stinking of thinner and hot metal, three in the morning and nobody else awake in the building. Firas's shoulders ache from holding a spray gun sideways for six hours straight, his heavy body sore in ways this one never learned to be sore. You'd been him less than a minute when you did the math again on the number and felt the specific boredom that isn't about him at all — it's about arriving somewhere and immediately knowing the whole shape of the rest of the night, the rest of the year, if you let it be the rest of anything. Seven hundred and forty-eight men and you have started to recognize this feeling faster than you used to: the settling. The part where a body starts to feel like a room you've already decorated. You liked Firas fine. That was the problem. You spun again because liking one is how you get stuck.

The canal path arrives without any seam at all — one stride is a heavy man in a Nevada garage, the next is tall and light and cold, breath coming visible in front of you, earbuds warm in your ears with something rhythmic and forgotten already playing. Your — his — foot comes down wrong for half a beat, a stumble that never quite becomes a fall, and then the legs correct themselves on their own, longer legs than you've wanted in a while, and the watch on the wrist buzzes a split for a mile you never ran.

It's the shoes that open first. Not sight, not thought — the shoes, the particular broken-in give of them against the arch, and with it a whole autumn of getting up before six, lacing them in a dark kitchen so the sound wouldn't wake her. Sarah. The name comes with the shirt against your back next, the thin base layer soaked at the spine already, and under it a morning three weeks ago, her half-asleep voice from the bed telling him not to wake the dog, him grinning in the dark because there is no dog, there has never been a dog, it's a joke they've had since the wedding that neither of them explains anymore because it doesn't need explaining, that's what four years does.

The ring is the loudest thing. Plain gold, left hand, cold from the morning air, and it drags up the actual day of it — a courthouse afterward-party at her cousin's place because the real venue fell through, both of them laughing too hard to be embarrassed, twenty-two years old and sure, so sure, in a way that this body still hasn't unlearned. And behind that, threaded into the same hand somehow, a different one — Claire, three years before Sarah, a girl who left for Chicago and a job and never once asked him to come, and the specific shame of how much that letting-go still costs him at odd hours, on runs like this one, when his mind has nothing else to chew on.

The jacket gives you the actual putting-on of it: forty minutes ago in his own telling, fumbling the zipper half-asleep, pulling the sleeves down over hands that were already reaching for the running watch on the nightstand, the small domestic weight of Sarah rolling over and saying *be careful of the ice* without opening her eyes. Nineteen years old in this body and it still surprises you, every time it surprises you, how young that is to already have a whole marriage folded into a Thursday morning.

The legs, underneath everything, are his in a way you notice with something like envy — no soreness at all yet, mile four and the lungs still generous, a leg that under different circumstances, sitting still, would already be bouncing, a tell his mother used to put her hand flat on to calm. Freckles across a nose you can't see but can feel the sun-memory of, a hundred summers of being told to wear sunscreen and not doing it. Small town behind him somewhere back along this path — a stoplight, a diner with the windows papered over, a laptop waiting open on a lawn later today for classes that feel very far from here right now, in the cold, in the fog off the water.

You stop running. You didn't decide to; the body simply does it, coasting down into a walk on the shoulder of the path, and you lift your hand — his hand — and look at the ring on it like you've never seen gold before.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, watching your own breath go up into the trees, "who are you."