Jonathan Pruitt Keane

You are standing in a Las Vegas kitchen in a body that weighs two hundred and sixty pounds, and the freckles on the backs of your hands are the first thing you are tired of. Thirty-five. Insurance. The man has a way of sighing before he sits down that you have caught in yourself twice tonight. Two minutes is all you gave him. He could not wake up wanting anything, and that was his whole trouble. You needed a body that could stand to be looked at by the one you left four minutes ago, and this one cannot even look at itself. So you pay, you spin, and the wheel clicks down.

Then you are on your side in the dark, and your thumb has stopped mid-scroll.

Blue light sits on your cheek. The phone is six inches from your face and the room is breathing around you, a radiator ticking, a pillow warm under your ear. Your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than whoever had it before. It flicks past everything he stopped on. You do not know what he was looking at, and you do not slow down to find out.

Your jaw is clenched. You didn't do it. You let it go, and it comes back.

The sheet is against your calves, and the cotton shirt gives you the first of him. A hand pulling this gray shirt off a hook in a hallway, years ago, a good wash made soft. Then a morning, and the other clothes: the white shirt buttoned cuff by cuff with a thumb that knows the buttons, the tie knotted by feel without a mirror, the radio clipped on the belt, the keys on the carabiner that bruise his hip all day. He is a store manager. There are pallets waiting in the aisle before opening, and the plastic wrap screams when he cuts it. His back knows the lifting, and your back remembers it now. Something low in it aches, a dull rope of it, from a hundred ordinary mornings.

The pillow gives you more. A Kingdom Hall, folding chairs, his mother's hand flat on his knee when he was nine, and the shame of a birthday that was never allowed. Then his own quiet faith, not performed, kept up like a lease. He doesn't smoke. Twice a month he drinks until the night goes soft, and tomorrow he pays for it. The money is thin, a card he checks before buying groceries.

Your nose is crooked. The memory comes with the floor, the bare boards through the sheet where one foot hangs off the mattress: a schoolyard in cold air, a stranger's elbow, the crack inside his head like a branch, and his father driving him in silence with a towel against his face. Now it is just the way the air goes past the bend.

His marble steps are worn hollow. You feel them under him, and the first sun coming down the block.

Then you remember the sailor, the nineteen-year-old with the beauty mark, the body you wore three spins back. He has looked at this man. You can feel it in how this man's chest holds still around the thought. You know what you did in that sailor's hands, and you know what he wants now. This body is a thing he asked for. It is warm and strong, and it is yours, and you put the phone down on the sheet.

You look at your hands. The calluses sit in the right places. You turn them over, then lift your eyes to the dark window and the blind.

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

Your thumb remembers the scroll. It will not tell you how long this lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether you wake up as him.