Kaimana Souza-Fetu

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Danny Escobedo's feet hurt. Three minutes in this body and already you know the left arch is shot, some old flat-footed inheritance from a lifetime standing on concrete, and the bar behind you is empty now, chairs up, the last drunk poured into a cab. You spun once to get here and it wasn't even a choice really, just Tuesday-brain, the itch that comes at the end of every shift when the body you're in has nothing left to give you that it hasn't already given. Danny's phone is in his pocket, unlocked still, some ex-girlfriend's name in the call log you don't recognize and don't care to. Three minutes is nothing. You haven't even finished the cigarette he apparently smokes one of a night, out back, alone. It's still lit, still between two fingers you didn't grow. You open the site instead. The wheel is already loading before you've decided anything, the same silver dial full of nobody in particular, and you spin it standing in a dead man's parking lot in Pittsburgh at the exact hour a stranger a thousand miles northeast is mid-stride on a dirt path, breathing hard, not thinking about you at all.

The stumble isn't a stumble. It's two steps that don't belong to anyone, and then they do — his weight drops into your legs like water finding a glass, and you're running. Cold air scrapes the back of a throat that isn't sore from cigarettes. The watch on the wrist buzzes, confused, logging a split with no history behind it. Trees strobe past, black and wet-barked, a canal on the left holding the sky flat and silver. Earbuds feed a song into ears that didn't choose it. Legs shorter than you're used to, dense with muscle, moving faster than they look like they should. You are 5'5" and you did not know that yet, not until the ground came up sooner than expected under two mismatched steps.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Black, damp at the spine, and it says: cold mornings, always cold mornings, seven years of them, since before the wedding even, since before the calluses on two fingers where a bass strap sits. The shirt remembers being pulled on in a gray bedroom with the heat still off, a man asleep behind you in the shape of a comma, one hand thrown across the empty side of the bed like it was reaching for something already gone from the mattress. You — no, him, this is his, you remind yourself, this is the rule — pulled the shirt down and looked at the man sleeping and thought, not for the first time, that thirty-one hadn't touched him yet, that whatever this was going to be, it was going to keep being good.

The watch gives you mile splits going back months, and under the numbers, a specific Tuesday: soundcheck at four, load-in at six, a room that holds maybe ninety people and somehow always finds ninety-one. Bass through the floor before it reaches the amp. A setlist taped to a monitor wing in handwriting that isn't yours — his, sloppy, left-handed slant. The tattoo on the arm burns faintly under the sleeve, script and a date, and it opens like a door: a small kitchen on an island half a world from Maine, a grandmother's name, a promise made at nineteen to never let the language die all the way out of him even out here, even this far from home, even married to a man who calls it *bird language* affectionately when he tries and fails to pronounce it.

The ring is the loudest thing he's wearing. It says a beach ceremony four years back, folding chairs sinking into sand, a best man who used to be more than that — an ex who still texts on birthdays, who still, if you're honest, if *he's* honest, occupies a room in him that's locked but not empty. The ring says a fight about touring too much. It says making up in a truck stop parking lot at 2 a.m., laughing too hard about nothing. It says *home* in the specific way that only fits one house — shingles gone the color of an oyster shell, traps stacked in the dooryard nobody's used to catch anything in years, the smell of low tide coming through a cracked window no matter the season.

The earbuds carry a bassline he wrote and never finished, looping under everything, patient, waiting for hands that know exactly where the low E lives without looking.

Your — his — lungs are stronger than they have any right to be at this pace. Sea-level air, an athlete's frame doing athlete's things without asking permission, and under the ribs a familiar, unbothered ache that has nothing to do with fear because there was never a warning to be afraid of. The stride settles. The watch buzzes again, syncing itself to a body it no longer entirely recognizes and has decided not to argue with.

You come up out of it slower than the arrival, the way surfacing always is. The trees keep going by. Somewhere behind you the last of Danny Escobedo's three minutes are already forgotten by whoever kept the bar without him. You lift both hands in front of your face without meaning to, still moving, still running, and look at them — the wedding band catching gray dawn light, the studs in the ears you can't see but can feel, small and cold.

"Not yet," you say, out loud, to no one, breath fogging in front of a face that isn't asking permission to keep going. "Not yet."

The path bends. The watch logs another mile you didn't earn honestly. You keep running, because he was, and there's no reason yet to stop.