Jacob Ellis Hartwell

You are standing at a sink in Houston, in a body that was yours for less than a minute, and the water is running warm over a hand you haven't learned. The apartment is asleep. A fan ticks somewhere. You came to brush your teeth and instead you are looking at a beauty mark in the mirror, a stranger's soft stomach under a stranger's shirt, and what you feel is not disappointment exactly. He was fine. He could have been a good one. But a drawer in the kitchen stuck when you pulled it, and your hand knew to lift and jiggle it, and you stood there with that knowledge that was not yours and understood it would never be yours. All of it would be borrowed, and you would be the one pretending. So you dry your hands on his towel and open the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You tell yourself it is only to see what it gives you.

It turns.

Dark. A pillow under your cheek, cold on one side and warm on the other. Blue light six inches from your eyes, and your thumb is stopped mid-scroll on something you did not choose. There is no travel. There was a sink and now there is a bed, and the breath in your chest is slower than the one you left, a sleepy, shallow breath. You start the thumb again. It moves faster than he was moving it, and steadier, flicking past everything he had paused on.

His things begin to talk.

The sleeve against your wrist is cotton gone soft from washing, and it gives you a morning: his hands, not yours, pulling it from a pile on a chair because it was the one that didn't smell, a Tuesday, rain on the window, a lecture at nine he did not want. The pillowcase has his hair in it, and it gives you a barbershop that wasn't one, a roommate with clippers, and the shag growing out because he liked how the fringe hid his eyes when he was tired. You touch your nose without meaning to, because his hand does that, and the bridge is crooked under your fingertip. Memory comes up whole: a pickup game, a elbow, a bright white crack, and his father in the car afterward saying, quietly, that God had let it set crooked so he would stay humble. He laughed at the time. He has never stopped feeling it.

The sheet under your calf is rough. It gives you a church basement, folding chairs, a youth group, a girl's name he never said aloud. It gives you a cigar on a roof with a friend, the one vice he allows himself, the sweetness of it and the guilt that came after. It gives you a bank balance he checks like a pulse, a number that never climbs. Money is a low hum in him, rent due, a laptop with a cracked corner, a campus lawn in the thin sun where he works because the apartment is too loud.

The body underneath is twenty-two and tired. His shoulder aches from sleeping on it. His legs are long and restless in their socks. His eyes burn from the screen, and his jaw, smooth, freshly shaved, feels cool when your knuckle crosses it. Nothing in him knows you are here.

You lift your hand into the blue light and turn it over. Long fingers, a callus on the side of the middle one from pens. You look up, past it, into the dark.

"Hello, Jacob," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected.

Somewhere a window rattles in the rain. You do not know how long he lasts. You listen for the wanting to return, and for now there is only the glow in your palm.