Joey Alama

The lathe's already off but your hands — his hands, the machinist's, freckled and pink and bald-knuckled — are still resting on the guard like the shift isn't really over. Six-thirty, Denver, end of a Tuesday that felt exactly like the last four hundred Tuesdays. You've worn this one two months. He's fine. He's nothing. Skinny fat and going soft at thirty-five, blue eyes that water in the wind, a body that aches in a boring, adult way. That's the trouble with him — not that anything's wrong, just that nothing is happening, and you've learned the difference between living in a man and serving out a sentence in one. The itch starts in your palm, in the freckles, an hour before you let yourself admit it. You wash the metal dust off at the sink, and by the time you're drying your hands you've already decided, the way you always decide, which is to say it decided you first.

The site loads the same as it always does, wheel and all, that stupid carnival-red wedge of color spinning under your cursor like it means something. You spin it standing at your own kitchen counter, in your own borrowed body, and for one half a second there's nothing —

— and then there's weight. A lot more of it than you had, arranged different, arms heavier, a jaw set against a pillow at an angle that isn't yours to choose. Face-down. One arm hanging off a mattress edge into cool air, blood pooling faint and prickling in the fingers. Sheets that smell like someone else's sleep. The breathing that was ragged — his, from underneath, from wherever he's gone — goes smooth in your chest in one pull, and the arm draws itself up without you quite deciding to move it, and you roll onto your back, hands coming together and folding at your sternum like a man laid out for a viewing. Streetlight leaks through a gap in heavy curtains, but it's afternoon-bright behind that gap, gold and hard, and something in the new body knows without knowing that this is wrong, this hour, this dark room at this time of day — and doesn't care, because the new body isn't running anything anymore.

It comes in through the sheets first. Cheap cotton, worn soft, a smell of laundry done at a laundromat two blocks from here because the unit's stacked machine broke in March and the landlord still hasn't fixed it — that whole small furious year of it arrives at once, mail slid under a door, a super named Hector who never calls back. Then the shirt against your back — no, not yet on you, draped somewhere over a chair, but close enough that its memory bleeds through anyway, denim-soft flannel gone thin at the elbows, and with it the morning three days ago when these exact sleeves went up these exact forearms, one at a time, right arm first always right arm first, some habit from a father who told him always dress your strong side first so it remembers it's strong. The tattoos on the hand and up the neck aren't ink now so much as history: an anchor for a grandfather who fished off Redondo before his lungs gave out, a rose for nobody in particular, just wanting something old-looking at nineteen. A palm frond at the throat that a girl named Desiree ran her thumb over on the second date and said it suits you, and that's most of why it's still there.

Desiree. That name comes with weather of its own — a girlfriend, two years running, a woman who leaves her hair ties on his nightstand and doesn't ask him to explain why he flinches getting up some mornings. The ache is in the hip, low, an old fall off a ladder in a job before this one, a joist that gave when it shouldn't have, four years healed and never right, a dull click on the third stair every single day of his life that he's stopped mentioning because mentioning it makes it more true. Roofing since twenty. Twenty-six now. Body still strong through the shoulders in a way that doesn't ask permission — the memory of a nail gun's kick, of straddling a pitch with L.A. laid out under him in a haze that isn't smog so much as just heat, of coming down a ladder at the end of a day so tired his hands wouldn't stop shaking, and being fine with that, because tired like that means the day meant something.

The hands. You feel them before you look, feel them doing what they do without him watching — thumbnail worrying at the cuticle of the index finger, an old unconscious tic, working a hangnail that was never actually there in the first place, just worry with nowhere better to go. Twenty-five to seventy-five thousand dollars sitting quiet in an account he barely checks, no faith of any kind steering him, no church, no ritual, just a big night out once or twice a month with guys from the crew and otherwise early to bed, no cigarettes, nothing in his lungs he didn't earn honestly on a roof. It's a good body. A used, honest, unremarkable-in-the-best-way body, and it's the afternoon on a Tuesday and somehow he was asleep for it, off-cycle, the kind of sleep a man only gets when the job started at four a.m. and finished before noon and the heat outside makes the apartment feel like a held breath.

You bring the folded hands up off your chest and turn them over in front of your face, palm to palm, watching the light from the curtain-gap catch the anchor tattoo, the fading rose, the scar you can just feel with a fingertip where an eyebrow was split once on a rafter and stitched crooked by somebody's mother who wasn't a nurse but acted like one.

You sit all the way up in his bed in his light in his life, and you say, to the empty room, in his voice, testing it like a new tool:

"Okay."