Isaiah Colburn

You are standing in a kitchen in Chicago, in the body of a man named Dale, with his thumb pressed into the soft place under a cauliflower ear, and the phone is lit on the counter. The page is open. The wheel is on it. His knees ache. They have ached the whole forty minutes you have been him, and you have noticed it the way you notice a stranger's cough on a train. Earlier, a coworker's wife called, and the voice on the line said *Dale, honey* in a way that did not belong to you, and you stood there being loved by mistake. That is all. You want to be somewhere nobody is waiting for you. You pay. You spin.

The dark opens like a door.

Hands at ten and two. Dash glow green on the knuckles. The highway is a black ribbon with white lights smeared far off, and the car is drifting a foot toward the line. You pull it straight in one smooth motion, and your arms know how, and your wrists are narrow and quick. Both hands come off the wheel and settle lower, wider, because you want to feel the road. Your thumb finds the turn signal and it ticks for an exit that isn't his. You let it tick.

The denim jacket is rough on the back of your neck. Under your thumbs the wheel has a worn place, and the wheel gives you something. A hot lot, boots in rows, a sergeant's voice at dawn, and him at nineteen, so proud of the stiff new uniform that he hung it on the closet door overnight just to look at it. Then the jacket's cuff, rolled twice. It was his brother's. He rolled it this morning in the bathroom mirror, left sleeve then right, grinning at his own dimples because his mother used to press a finger into each one. The gray tee is soft from washing. The belt buckles over a skinny stomach that is hungry, so hungry, a gas-station-burrito hunger. The tattoos on his forearm itch faintly where the sleeve brushes: the crest of a team he loved when he was fifteen, a cluster of small drawings a friend did with a needle and a steady hand. Something cold at his chest, a bar of metal against the shirt, a piercing nobody at the barracks knows about. A girl's laugh in a kitchen, an old ex, her name still caught in his throat like a seed. Keys swing from the ignition against your knee. Their jingle brings a turquoise house, chain-link, dust gone white in the light, a porch where he sits with nobody and thinks it is fine. He has a little saved. He thinks about it like a prayer he doesn't say. His sneakers are worn at the heel, and the pedal sits right under your foot.

All of it arrives in a few breaths, then stops. The exit sign comes up green.

You lift your right hand off the wheel and look at it. Long fingers. A dark palm creased pale. You turn it over, and over again. Then you look up into the dark glass, where his face looks back with the dimples showing even at rest.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The signal keeps ticking. You don't know whether you'll be him at the next light, or tomorrow, or whether the wanting is already starting.