Jamal Okwuosa

Rene Balderas's office smells like printer toner and the coffee he burned an hour ago, and you have been sitting behind his desk for less than a minute deciding you don't want it anymore. It isn't the store, exactly, or the height, though the height bothers you more than you'd say — reaching for the top shelf in the stockroom this morning and feeling short in a body for the first time in three hundred spins. It's that Rene had a fight with his sister on the drive in, still sitting in his chest like a stone, and you inherited the stone along with the rest of him, and you are tired of other men's stones before you've even learned their names. Wednesday, end of day, register counts already done. You lock the office, walk to the car, and open the site on your phone instead of starting the engine. The wheel is already spinning before you've admitted to yourself why.

It lands, and you are sitting down.

Weight drops into you all at once — more of it than Rene had, set differently, shoulders wider, thighs heavier against a couch cushion gone soft in the middle. A controller is warm in two hands that are not the hands you had four seconds ago. On the screen a character you don't recognize takes three rounds to the chest and folds, and the thumbs under yours twitch toward the sticks a half-beat too late to save him, muscle memory arriving before you do. You feel the room before you see it — hot light lying in a slab across a wood floor, a window throwing afternoon straight into your face, heat coming through glass like a held hand. You set the controller down still glowing and sit back into a body that is not asking you anything yet.

The tank top comes first, because it's already on you, damp under the arms from an afternoon that hasn't cooled off — and with the cotton against your ribs comes the memory of pulling it over your head this morning, sun already brutal at nine, the AC in the bedroom rattling and losing. Jamal doesn't like this shirt much, just clean and close at hand, a tour shirt from a band whose name is half-worn off, bought at a merch table in some other city for some other version of him. The sweatpants next, drawstring loose at the waist, and with them the whole morning: coffee on the back step watching a dove work the gravel yard, the saguaros standing like men who've been waiting a long time for something, texting his bandmate about the amp that keeps buzzing on the low E.

The bracelets on his wrist are next, wood beads and a leather cord, and they open wider than the shirt does — a birthday, somebody's hands fastening it for him, laughing, a face you don't get to keep because the memory closes before it gives you the name. But the ache under it stays: an ex-boyfriend, recent enough that the shape of missing him hasn't dulled yet, missing him specifically at moments like this, doing nothing, the kind of hour that used to have two people in it. You feel it the way Jamal feels it, low and unargued-with, not yours but sitting in your chest like Rene's stone did an hour and eight hundred miles away.

His hands know things without you. The knuckles crack on their own, a habit older than any memory attached to it, just a small violence he does to himself when his mind is elsewhere — and his mind is elsewhere a lot, you're learning, because under the couch-cushion stillness there's a stage under him more often than not, a small one, gravel crunching where an audience will stand in a few hours, soundcheck light blinding white off equipment cases. His forearms carry the ink that made it onto that portrait — a cross, praying hands, other men's iconography borrowed and worn on his own skin because faith is a thing he keeps without keeping the building it came from. Twenty-five years old and the body already knows how to hold a guitar, how to find a rhythm with his foot before his brain agrees to it, how to smile with a gap in his teeth that he stopped being self-conscious about years ago because somebody once told him it was the first thing they noticed and meant it kindly.

The room smells like heat and old couch fabric and, faintly, weed from a neighbor's yard drifting through a cracked window. None of it is Houston. None of it is Rene's stone. You sit inside a stranger's ordinary Wednesday afternoon, controller glow dying beside you, character on-screen respawning into an empty firefight nobody's steering, and you let yourself just be twenty-five and heavy-shouldered and a little heartbroken for a second, because it isn't yours to carry and that is, this time, exactly the relief you spun for.

You lift your hands off your knees and turn them over, waves of afternoon light catching the bracelets, the gap in your teeth showing when your mouth falls open on its own.

"Whose turn is it," you say, to no one, to the dead screen, and you don't know yet if you mean the game.