Kevin Marchetti

The bus is doing forty on a road that doesn't need forty, and Manny Cardosa's shoulders are aching in that specific bolted-in way they always do by ten, the way that never used to bother you until this body's fifty-year-old spine started reporting for duty every morning like it had something to prove. You have been him for less than a minute, by his own accounting, and already you know the whole shape of the rest of the day: the loop, the transfer point, the guy who always tries to talk about the Raiders, the ache. Nothing wrong with it. It's just that you had it already, the last six hundred and twenty-two times added up to knowing exactly what a body like this gets you, and knowing is the thing that kills it. Somewhere behind Manny's eyes, small and constant as a pilot light, is the fact that the site is still open in a tab, that you never actually closed it, that you told yourself last night you were only checking the odometer before bed and instead sat with your thumb over the wheel for eleven minutes. You pull into the depot lot on a break you're not due for. You take out the phone. You spin.

The bed comes up under you before the room does — a cheap mattress, a body's weight dropping onto it that isn't dropping, already sitting, already arranged, knees apart, a phone warm in two hands that a second ago belonged to someone shorter and rounder and bald. Now they're leaner, freckled at the knuckle, a tremor already going in the right one that isn't fear, just a habit older than this moment. The screen is mid-unlock. A face resolves under the code — not this face, an old wallpaper flickering up first, a woman on a beach, gone — and then the home screen floods with someone else's noise, texts addressed to Dom, Dominic, hey Dom you around, and the thumb, already moving before you tell it to, starts scrolling down through a stranger's life at the unhurried, entitled speed of a man reading his own mail.

The shirt is what opens first, gray cotton gone soft at the collar from washing, and it gives you a Tuesday: him pulling it over his head in a locker room that smells like rubber and diesel and the particular mildew of turnout gear that never fully dries, some other guy — Petrosky, the name arrives with the smell — snapping a towel at nobody in particular, and Kevin laughing with his mouth closed around a toothpick because the captain's walking the floor. Under that, further down, is the whole rack he keeps his gear on, the coat with his name stenciled crooked because he did it himself at two in the morning after a bad shift, the boots that are always half a size too honest about how his feet have flattened over twenty years of ladders. His leg starts bouncing against the mattress edge — not new, not yours, his, the knee going like it's keeping time to something only it can hear, the thing it does at meetings, at dinner, at the doctor's office when they take his blood pressure and frown and say the word again, elevated, and he says yeah, I know, like it's weather.

The phone itself gives you the last three days: buying it off a guy on the app for eighty bucks because his own screen finally spiderwebbed past readability, wiping it, or thinking he wiped it, and then last night — his own bed, his own apartment two stops from the firehouse — Rachel texting him a link, try this, my cousin says it's hilarious, and him lying back against the headboard peeling into a stranger's abandoned accounts instead, laughing once, out loud, alone, at a message thread that wasn't his to read. Rachel arrives whole with the thought of her: eight months, her laugh too loud for restaurants, the mole joke she makes every single time she touches his cheek like she's dusting for prints — right there, right there — and how he lets her, how nobody else gets to touch it and comment, how it's hers now the way a scar becomes a landmark once someone loves the map.

The tattoo on his forearm answers when your eye lands on it before your hand does — the eagle, globe, anchor, faded to blue-gray now, and under it the whole heat of a base you can't place by name but can place by smell, sweat and gun oil and a friend's face you don't get given, mercifully, because some rooms in a man stay shut even to this. What comes instead is simpler: the discipline of it, muscle that still snaps to a whistle nobody's blown in twenty years, the reason his spine sits straight even sitting slumped on a stranger's memory of a bed. A pack of cigarettes is not in his hand but you know exactly where it is, jacket pocket, and the wanting for one arrives like weather too, low and constant, a hum under everything the way the leg hums, the way the blood in him runs a little too hard against its own walls.

You look down. The hand on the phone is thin at the wrist, tendon-strung, a burn scar ghosted pale across two knuckles that no memory bothers explaining because some things a body just has. You turn it over once, palm up, like checking it's real, like checking it's yours, though it never was and you already know it won't stay.

You look up into the lamp light, into the room that isn't the room you were bored of an hour and a hemisphere ago, and you say, quiet, to no one, "Okay. Okay, who are you."