Joey Sciortino

The wheel loads slow on a bad connection, a little pinwheel of color spinning in the middle of a page that otherwise looks like nothing, like a parking ticket site or a dentist's booking form. It is the middle of the morning where you are. You should be doing something with that time. Instead you are doing this, because you have wanted to do this since before you can remember wanting anything else — not sex, not money, the actual want underneath those, which is to stop being the one person you have only ever been. You have read every thread. You have watched every film with a body-swap in it twice. You have never once been able to buy it before today. The card details go in easier than they should. You press spin mostly sure it will error out, give you a sad little gif, a refund notice. It does not.

There is no fall and no floor meeting you. There is a street, wet, orange under a sodium lamp, and a shoe that was scuffing every third step that simply — stops. Your foot, which a half-second ago was not yours, lands flat and even. A hand that caught a parked car to keep a body upright is still braced on the cold wet metal of its hood. You are behind his eyes. He does not know you are there because there is no he left to know it, only the shape of him, warm, nineteen years old, a little sick with how much he's had, and you, filling it like water finding a glass.

The hand on the car is callused along the heel of the palm and smells, when it lifts, of bleach gone through cotton gloves too many times. That's the first thing that comes back — not a picture, a smell, and behind the smell a whole swinging arc of fluorescent light: a corridor, lockers on both sides, a mop bucket's wheel catching on a floor seam over and over, squeak squeak squeak, the particular hour-three-in-the-morning hum of a building built for teenagers and currently holding only him. Joey. The name arrives with the keys at your hip, their small cold weight swinging as you — he — walks. You know it's a key ring because your hip has known it every night for two years, the drag of it, the way it never quite stops moving even when you've stopped.

The jacket is open over a hoodie, and when the wet denim brushes your wrist you get this morning, or last evening really, dressing for a shift that started at eleven: pulling the gray uniform shirt off its hanger in a room with a water stain shaped like Florida on the ceiling, buttoning it one-handed while the other hand found a vape on the nightstand and took a pull that did nothing for the headache already arriving. The shirt's buttons are small and slightly too big for their holes, something you — he — has complained about to no one. Under it his chest is nineteen and average, no gym in it, no softness either, just a body that walks eleven miles a night pushing a cart and hasn't figured out yet what thirty will cost it. The knees ache faintly already, low and dumb, from kneeling to scrape gum off tile. His hands know, without being told, the particular grip for wringing a mop head dry one-fisted, the flick of a spray bottle trigger, and beneath the desk at the front they know a pen, clicking it open-closed-open with nothing to write, a tic that isn't thinking so much as not-thinking.

There's a woman in this too, arriving through the jacket pocket where a receipt still sits, the one from a diner on Fourth where she ordered the same thing every time and he never once got tired of watching her order it. Her name comes half-formed, more gone than present, a door he has learned to walk past in the hallway of himself without putting a hand on the knob. Amanda. Mandy. Something that still has weather in it, two years on. He hasn't told anyone that's who he's thinking about at two in the morning with a mop in his hands, because there's no one on shift to tell, and that's most nights now — the school empty, every kid and teacher and parent asleep in a borough he can't afford to live any further into, and him moving through it like a ghost getting paid nine dollars over minimum to keep it clean for people who will never know his name.

The vape is in the jacket's other pocket, and gripping it gives you the daily shape of him: a pull taken on the stoop before work, another on break, the flavor some drugstore mint gone stale in the cartridge. And under the vape, deeper, a flask he isn't carrying tonight but has carried, the specific shame-taste of drinking alone walking home because home is a room with Florida on the ceiling and nobody in it, and drinking makes the walk shorter even when, like tonight, it makes him take the long way instead and not notice.

None of this takes longer than it takes a body to come off a curb, catch itself, and straighten. You are still standing in the same two seconds the wheel put you in. The shoe-scuff doesn't come back. The next forty steps land clean because you are, already, being more careful with him than he was being with himself ten seconds ago.

You lift your hands — his hands, chapped at the knuckles, a thin white scald mark long healed into nothing worth calling a mark, nails cut practically short — and turn them over under the streetlight like you've never seen hands before, which, in this exact arrangement of atoms, you haven't.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty street, in a voice that creaks a little from the cold and the two drinks still in it. "Okay."

You don't know how long you get to keep saying things in it. Nobody tells you that part. You turn left at the corner, which is not the way home, and for now that's fine, because for now there's no home to get wrong.