Jesse Kowalczyk

You are standing in a kitchen in Small-town Ohio, in Colby Hartzler, and the refrigerator is the only thing awake. Six-foot-four of you leans on the counter in the dark. Your knuckles are sore from a bolt that would not break loose on Friday, and you can still feel it in the meat of your thumb. You are twenty-seven and heavy through the middle, and the gap in your front teeth whistles when you breathe through your mouth. You have been him for less than a minute. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Everything fits, the house sleeps, and you stand there already knowing what the fitting is worth. You open the page and the wheel is waiting. You pay. You don't say the reason aloud, even to the dark.

The wheel turns and the kitchen is gone.

Highway. Dark. The car drifts a foot toward the line and you pull it straight in one smooth motion. Both hands are on the wheel, and then you settle them lower and wider. The dash glow sits on your knuckles. Your hand has already put the signal on for an exit that isn't his, and it ticks.

The hoodie is soft at the wrists, and in the cuffs a morning opens. It is the barracks yard, cold, and he is pulling this gray hoodie over a T-shirt because the heat in the bay is broken. His breath smokes. Someone calls him Kowalczyk across the gravel, and the name lands in his chest like a hand. You didn't know it was yours until it landed.

The wheel is leather gone smooth where his thumbs ride, and it gives you a smaller memory. His father taught him ten and two in an empty church lot, and he taught him to pray the same way, hands where they belong. The faith is still in him like a pulled muscle. He doesn't doubt it. He just carries it carefully, the way he carries the other thing. That thing is a man's name he has never said out loud to anyone in uniform. He keeps it folded small.

Your pocket holds a lighter and a crushed pack, and your lungs know the pack. Twenty a day. The craving is a tidy little hook behind the sternum. It is nowhere near hunger and it is entirely sure of itself. Your shoulders are loose and strong, and your thighs are hard against the seat from a year of rucking. The mole high on your cheek itches, and you don't touch it. You are twenty-four, light, quick, and slightly drunk on how easily this body moves. Somewhere there is money put away, slowly and without joy, and a hope attached to it.

Three miles from home, and the exit is wrong. His hands chose it. There is a diner there where he sometimes parks with the engine off and the radio low, only to be nobody's soldier for twenty minutes.

You take your right hand from the wheel and hold it up in the dash light. You turn it over. Calluses sit at the base of the fingers, and the skin is chapped across the knuckles. It is a hand that has held a rifle, a hymnal, and a cigarette.

You lift your eyes to the mirror, to the face with the mole, and say, "Okay, Jesse. Show me where we're going."

The signal keeps ticking. You wonder how long you get to be him, or whether the wanting is already waking up under your ribs.