Kenny Odom

You've been Ray Loman for three minutes and it's already wrong. The scar through his eyebrow itches like a memory that isn't yours, and his knees ache in a way that says decades of standing post, and somewhere down the block a bus hisses and you think: this is not the body you wanted, this is just the body the wheel gave you, and Ray's whole apartment smells like his ex-wife's candles even though she's four years gone. His hands — thin, scarred, a guard's hands — are shaking a little on the kitchen counter and you know it isn't fear. It's you, restless in him already, wanting out of a life you didn't choose and never got to want. You had him for three minutes. That's enough. You open the site again on his phone, the wheel loads, and you spin before you can think better of it.

The lathe sound doesn't come. Instead: a lamp too bright, a needle noise, a green sting on the inner forearm, and weight — real weight, shoulders and belly and a bald head warm under the shop lights. The arm you're braced under stops flinching mid-line. The jaw that was clenched goes loose, slack, curious, like the man wearing this face just wandered off and left the room running. You turn your head — his head — and watch the needle go into the skin like it's happening to somebody else's furniture.

It comes in through the shirt first — no, no shirt, just the black t-shirt damp under the arms, and it opens like a door: Kenny Odom, thirty-three, standing outside a casino loading dock at four in the morning in another life entirely, laughing with a guy named Mike who used to move sofas up six flights in Queens for a living before whatever brought him out west. You know Mike. You wore Mike. Two spins back you stood in that furniture mover's body and knew this face across a break table, knew the sound of Kenny's laugh before you knew his name, felt the ordinary warmth of a coworker who covers your shift when you're hungover. Nine minutes ago, by some clock that doesn't run the same in every life, you left Mike standing in a stairwell. Now you're standing inside the guy Mike would call if his truck broke down.

The chair under you is old vinyl, patched with tape, and the tape brings back the shop itself — not this one, the regular one, off Charleston, where Kenny's been getting this sleeve finished piece by piece for six years, since he was twenty-seven and dumber about money. The dagger through the skull was the first piece; the banner under it he still hasn't decided what to put there. Green soap smell brings the whole ritual back: showing up after a night shift at the machine plant, chips still caught in his boot treads, the tattoo guy always laughing at how he tracks metal shavings across the linoleum.

The shirt against your back gives you this morning — his morning, hours ago by his clock, though the light outside says otherwise, because Kenny works graveyard at a specialty shop machining parts for the casinos' slot mechanisms, and Monday for him started at midnight. He'd pulled the black tee over his head in the dark so he wouldn't wake Danielle, who works days and sleeps light, who he's been with two years now, whose voice he can still hear saying don't be too late, the kids have practice. Two kids, not his by blood, hers from before, and somehow that stopped mattering around month four. His leg starts bouncing against the chair — old habit, nerves he doesn't name — and it brings back the ex, Priya, gone eight months now, the fights that were never about what they said they were about, and how he still checks his phone sometimes hoping and hating that he does.

His hands — thick, machinist's hands, a burn scar across two knuckles he doesn't remember getting, calluses that know a lathe control without looking — rest heavy on his own thighs. Heavier than Ray's. Heavier than Mike's, even. There's a comfort in the weight, like ballast. He smokes when he drinks, and some part of the body wants a cigarette right now for no reason at all, just the shape of the craving passing through like weather.

You look down at the arm. The needle's stopped — the artist's leaned back, saying something about the outline being clean — and you turn the hand over, palm up, knuckles down, this stranger's hand that isn't a stranger's anymore, freckles scattered up to the wrist, chip-scarred, warm.

You look up into the mirror bolted to the wall across the room, and you say, "Let's finish it."