Kaito Sugimoto

Feliciano's kitchen smells like the coffee he never got to drink. You are standing over the sink at some grey hour before the sun, and this body's hands — his hands, the ones you've had for two minutes — are shaking in that particular way that has nothing to do with cold. Fifty-five years old, gut soft over the belt, and the heart underneath it stuttering like a bad lock. You know locks. He knew locks. You feel it going wrong in the chest and you think, clearly, in the sudden cold-water way you think about these things now: not this one, not again, get out before it decides for you. There is no ambulance you would wait for. There is a phone in the other room with the site already open in a tab, because some nights you keep it open the way other men keep a drink poured and untouched. You do not finish the coffee. You do not lock the door. You spin.

The television light is blue-green and moving, and then it is not television light, it is you, sitting up straight where a second ago you were sunk backward into cushions, and the remote is coming down out of a loose hand onto the couch arm with a small plastic click that sounds enormous. Lungs that are not the lungs you left — no ache in them, no flutter — pull in air clean and easy, and it is the strangest sensation you have carried out of the wheel yet, this quiet. A room you don't know closes in around you: low light, a doorframe, a framed photo you can't make out, some vending machine somewhere outside throwing a thin colored glow against a window you haven't turned to yet. The show on the screen cuts to something bright and you watch it, and you do not laugh, though something under your face remembers that a joke just landed there a moment ago and usually would have.

The shirt is what starts it — not this shirt, no shirt at all right now, just a t-shirt gone soft at the collar, but the memory doesn't care what you're wearing, it comes anyway off the couch fabric under your palm, the exact grain of it, and suddenly it's this morning, black button-down going on over his head at the restaurant, sleeve after sleeve, the apron strings crossing behind his back the way they always cross, tied by muscle and not thought. Eighteen years old in that memory and self-conscious about the belly under the apron in a way he'd never say to anyone, least of all to her — Aiko, the girlfriend, texting him during service about a movie, and under that, quieter, the ex whose name still makes something in his chest tip sideways when it surfaces, Yuna, who he still thinks about at exactly this hour on exactly this kind of quiet night, which is maybe why he was watching television with the lights off instead of sleeping.

The pen he clicks without noticing is not in his hand now but you feel the habit anyway, phantom in the fingers, click click click through a slow shift, through evenings folding napkins into triangles, through a dozen tables of chairs turned up onto tabletops after closing, the particular ache low in his back from being on his feet, the dad-bod softness of him that customers' eyes slide over and that he has made a kind of peace with, mostly, on good days. He prays before the sun is up most mornings and skipped it tonight, tired, telling himself he'd catch the next one, a small guilt sitting under everything like a stone in a shoe. He has never had a drink in his life, never wanted the cigarettes his coworkers step outside for. Freckles across his nose that Aiko likes to count out loud, joking, and that he never quite believed were anything worth noticing until she said so.

You look down. The hand on your knee is younger than any hand you've worn in eight tries — no calluses like Feliciano's, no old man's spots, just faint traces of dish-soap dryness and a farmer's tan line at the wrist from short sleeves under a long-sleeved uniform. You turn it over slowly in the blue TV light, watching it not quite believing it's yours, the way you always do and never stop finding strange.

Then you lift your eyes to the dark window, to your own faint reflection over the vending machine's glow outside, and you say, quiet, to no one:

"Okay. Who are you tonight."