Harlan Dietrich

It is the middle of the morning where you are, a Sunday, nothing on, the kind of hour that exists only to be scrolled through. You have wanted this since before it had a name you could put to it — the films where someone wakes up wrong, the forums at two a.m., the question that never quite goes away: what would it be to be someone else, really, not pretend. You found the site the way you find most things, half by accident, and did not believe the wheel would do anything at all. You paid anyway. You spun anyway.

It lands on him mid-breath.

A kitchen, dim except for one gooseneck lamp burning yellow over a countertop that needs replacing. A phone in a hand that is suddenly yours and was his a half-second ago, thumb still lifted off the glass like it's waiting for permission to move again. The screen shows a watch. Steel case, a price with too many digits in it, a payment plan that would still outlast the thing's warranty. You feel the weight of the hand before you understand it is a hand — heavier than you expected, the knuckles thick, a ring loose enough to spin on the finger it sits on. Evening presses against a dark window behind you. Late enough in Texas to be alone with a phone and a number you can't make smaller by looking at it longer.

The thumb drops. The phone turns itself face-down on the counter, and the hand that set it there does not go back for it.

The shirt is what opens first — flannel, soft at the elbows from years, snug at the belly in a way that has stopped being news to him. A flash: this morning, before any of this, pulling it off a hook by the back door because the other one was in the wash, one arm then the other, not thinking about it, the same unthinking that dressing a body for forty years teaches a man. The shoulder seam catches a little on the left side where he's heavier than he used to be, skinny everywhere else and soft right there, and there's a whole unspoken history in that catch — a wife who used to say something about it, fondly, and isn't there to say it anymore. The grief doesn't arrive as a wound. It arrives as an absence shaped exactly like a joke she used to make.

The jeans next, worn through at one knee from kneeling on a catwalk grating that eats denim for a living. A flash of the plant: fluorescent light sheeting down off a line of machines he has watched turn raw stock into finished product for eleven years as the man in charge of whether it goes right, boots on steel mesh thirty feet up, radio crackling, the particular ache that lives in his lower back by three in the afternoon and never fully leaves. His hands know things without asking — the two-finger signal to a line operator that means slow it down, the habit of touching a rail before he leans on it, forty years of a body trained toward caution it never asked for and can't unlearn.

The boots against the linoleum — brown, cracked at the crease, standing on a floor that's been cleaned so many times the pattern's worn pale in a path from sink to stove. A flash of a woman at that stove, years back, and the particular quiet of the house after there was only one plate to set down. One child, grown, a voice on the phone more than a face in the room. Church on Sundays, a faith that was never loud about itself, just steady, the kind that gets a man through the part of the week where nobody's watching.

The ring is the last door, because it's the one his hand already knows how to open without you. Left hand, gold gone a little thin with turning, and it turns now, under this thumb, the same motion it has made ten thousand evenings without him noticing he does it. A flash — not a wedding, nothing that clean — just her hand next to his on a truck's bench seat, years of ordinary Saturdays, and the fact that the hand next to his has been gone long enough that turning the ring is the only version of reaching for her that still works.

Five-seven of a feeling that lived at six feet, soft through the middle, strong through the forearms in the specific way of a man who has climbed stairs on a catwalk for most of his working life and never once lifted a weight on purpose. Age in the knees. Age in the lower back. None of it urgent, all of it present, like weather he's lived in so long he forgot it was weather.

You look down. The hand is still faintly curled from the phone it isn't holding anymore. You turn it over once, the way he does without thinking, the ring catching the lamp.

"Didn't need that watch anyway," you say, out loud, to the dark window, and you don't know yet if that's a decision or just the first thing his voice found to say — or how long you'll be the one saying things in it.