Keith Branscomb

It is the middle of the day where you are, and nothing about the day deserves the name. You already did the thing you tell people was work. You already scrolled through the thing everyone calls news. Now there is just the screen, and the tab you keep open at the bottom of everything else, the one you don't let anyone look at over your shoulder, because it isn't shameful exactly, just embarrassingly sincere: the forums, the fan edits, the old movies where a man wakes up wrong and spends ninety minutes learning his own stolen face in a mirror. You have wanted this since before you knew it was a want and not just a curiosity. Not to watch it. To happen.

vessel.cards doesn't look like it should work. A wheel, a price, a button that says SPIN rendered in a font too friendly for what it's offering. You pay anyway. You have been paying attention to this feeling for years and never once been able to spend money on it. Now you can. Your thumb finds the button the way his thumb, a thousand miles and nine hours away, is finding a price he can't afford. You press it at exactly the second he lifts his thumb off the glass.

The kitchen is dark around you, except for the strip of light under the cabinet, and the phone is going face-down on the counter under a hand that isn't stopping to pick it back up, because it isn't his hand making that decision anymore. It's yours, wearing his. You feel the weight of fifty-one years settle into the backs of your knees before you feel anything else — a looseness there, a complaint the body has been voicing for a while now that you simply inherit mid-sentence. The flannel is heavy and a little too warm for indoors. There's a ring on the fourth finger of this hand, snug, warm from his skin, turning slightly when the hand flexes. The kitchen smells like dish soap and the particular staleness of a house where everyone else is asleep and you are not supposed to be awake either.

It comes in through the shirt first. Not a memory exactly — a gesture, his own hand smoothing the plaid collar flat against his collarbone at six this evening, a habit from a closet that still has his father's old flannel shirts bagged for Goodwill because his mother can't do it herself. Then more: this exact shirt, bought three Christmases ago by his wife, who said you're not twenty-five anymore, Keith, stop wearing t-shirts like a kid in this weather, and meant it kindly, and he'd laughed and worn it anyway because she'd picked it. The collar remembers her hands adjusting it once, at some dinner, fixing it the way wives fix collars.

The jeans know the classroom. They know bending down at a kidney-shaped table, knees popping, to get level with a six-year-old's drawing of a dog that is mostly circles, saying that's a great dog, and meaning it, because this is the part of the job nobody warns you is the whole job — not the aide title, not the photocopying, but twenty small faces deciding every morning whether today is a good day, and some mornings you are the reason it is. He is good at this. Better than he expected to be, twelve years in, better than the teachers who outrank him on paper. His knees ache in a way that is thirty years of standing, and his lower back has a permanent, low complaint that the body simply hands you without ceremony, the way it would hand you anything.

The toothpick isn't in his mouth right now — it's in his shirt pocket, dry, chewed flat on one end, and touching it through the fabric brings back church. Brings back the long liturgies, standing because sitting felt wrong, the toothpick a replacement for the cigarettes he quit thirty years ago and never once missed, he tells himself, mostly true. Brings back his son, nineteen now, who used to steal the spare toothpicks out of the kitchen drawer to chew them just like Dad, and how that undid something in his chest every single time, still does.

The wedding band turns again on its own, a habit this hand knows without him, and that brings the wife whole: her name arriving like a held breath let out, the smell of her side of the bed, an argument eight years ago about money that neither of them has fully put down even now, the way she still reaches for his hand across the console of the car at red lights without looking over, like checking he's still there. You are standing in his kitchen in the dark with that reaching-hand feeling still warm in the palm, and the scroll he interrupted — the watch, the price, four months of a salary he doesn't have — sits underneath all of it like a held breath of its own, a small shame he'd never have said aloud to her, or to anyone, this wanting one single beautiful expensive stupid thing in a life that is otherwise, by every measure he'd give you if you asked him sober and honest, good. Worth, measured any way that matters to the people totaling it up, more than he lets himself believe some nights at this counter.

The phone is face-down and you don't turn it back over. Your hand — his hand, broad, a little sun-spotted across the back, the mole sitting high on the cheek above it in the dark window's reflection — comes up in front of your face, and you turn it, palm up, palm down, slow, the way a man checks a tool he's not sure is still his.

You lift your eyes to the black window over the sink, where the glass is giving you back just enough of a face to call it a face.

"Okay," you say, to the kitchen, to the house, to the sleeping wife down the hall you have not met yet and already know the shape of, "okay. I'm here."

You don't know for how long. Neither does the wheel.