Kenji Tashiro

The dolly is halfway up the ramp when the ache in your shoulders reminds you whose shoulders they are. Blond hair stuck to a wide forehead, dimples cut into a face that has smiled at nobody today. Twenty-seven bodies ago you were somebody else and none of it mattered, and it will not matter tomorrow either, because this one — this one is done. Not the pain, you could carry the pain. It's the sameness. Six a.m., a couch that weighs what all couches weigh, a foreman named Rick who calls you "big man" like it's the only thing he knows about you. You set the dolly down at the top of the ramp, still holding the couch's weight in your forearms, and you think: not this again. You think it clean through, the way you always do right before, and your thumb finds the phone in your pocket, and vessel.cards is already open in a tab from last night because some part of you decided this hours before the rest of you agreed.

You spin standing in the truck's shadow, six-fifteen in Ohio, no one watching.

The toothbrush is between your teeth and your teeth are not the teeth you had. Smaller jaw, more give in it, a groove of a chin you can feel with your tongue before you feel it with your hand. The stroke you were mid-way through finishes itself on muscle memory that isn't yours yet but acts like it is — brushing stops, then starts again, other side, slower, working the back molars like there's no hurry in the world. Foam at the corner of a mouth you didn't grow. Tap running. A mirror throwing back a face you have never once seen from this side of it.

You rinse twice. You stand the brush bristles-up, and that gesture alone — the smallness of it, the care — starts the first flash: this is a man who rinses twice, always, who cannot stand the film that's left on plastic bristles, who was taught that by somebody, a mother maybe, in a bathroom nothing like this one, tile instead of this cheap laminate counter.

The tattoos are what open first, because the arm is bare to the elbow and the cool bathroom air is sitting right on the ink. The cross on the forearm — you got that at twenty-two, cheap parlor near the temple your grandmother still goes to every week even though you stopped going with her, and the guy doing the outline joked about the contradiction and you told him it wasn't a contradiction, it was a translation, faith is faith, and he'd shrugged and kept working. The praying hands on the other arm came later, after your son was born, in a year you'd rather not fully remember — the phone call, the ex who is not the mother of that son, the one who is still somewhere in you like a low note under everything else, the one you sometimes think about at red lights for no reason you'd admit to Priya, who is asleep four feet away right now with her arm thrown over the space where you should be. Two kids. Neither hers. She knows and she stayed anyway and some nights you don't understand your own luck and other nights you feel like a man juggling something he's going to drop.

Your leg starts bouncing before you've even registered you're standing still. It does that. Has done that since you were a kid too fidgety for temple, too fidgety for the sales floor, and somehow it became the thing that closes deals — restless energy read as hunger, as drive. Muscle remembers the pitch decks, the hotel lobbies, the lanyard weight against your sternum between meetings, the little laminated badge with your name half-obscured by the fold. Yesterday's version of that badge is probably still clipped to the jacket on the chair in the bedroom, next to the bed where your girlfriend sleeps through this, where your phone sits face-down and silent because it's the middle of the night here and nobody in Los Angeles is awake to notice a man standing at his own sink a half-second too long.

The shirt against your back — no, there's no shirt, just the t-shirt from the picture in your mind that hasn't happened yet tonight, the one from this morning, from yesterday morning, all his mornings collapsing into the one your fingers remember: pulling it over damp hair still short from the last cut, tapered close at the sides on purpose because his girlfriend likes to run her hand up the back of his neck and feel where the hair changes. The vape in the pocket of the jacket on that same chair, three pulls before bed most nights, told himself he'd quit before the kids are old enough to ask.

Your hands know how to lift a sample case, shake a stranger's hand a half-second too long to be memorable, steady a toddler on a hip that isn't yours anymore and never was, not really — is Kenji's, all of it Kenji's, and you are only standing in the borrowed quiet after his day ended and before it starts again, in a bathroom that smells like his toothpaste and somebody else's future.

You look down. The hands at your sides are someone else's hands, narrower through the wrist than the ones you had this morning, ink at the forearm catching the bathroom light.

You turn one over, study the palm like it might have an answer written on it.

"Okay," you say, to the mirror, to nobody, to him. "Let's see what you've got going tomorrow."