Kevin Matsuda

Denny Aucoin's knees ache on the ladder rungs that aren't even there — a phantom soot-ache, thirty-nine years old and one day, and it is Saturday morning in the Quarter and the light coming through his shotgun-house window is doing nothing for you. You have been him for a little over a day and it was enough. The chimney brushes leaning by the door, the flyer with his face and his rates, the smell of creosote that never leaves a man's cuticles no matter how he scrubs — it was a good body, a working body, a body that knew how to climb. But you spun it up out of curiosity and curiosity is a debt that comes due fast, and this morning, standing over his coffee not drinking it, the wanting comes back the way it always does, low and simple: *not this one, not today, something else.* You don't examine it further than that. You never do. You open the laptop already on his kitchen table, the site already bookmarked from twenty-four spins ago, and you pay, and you spin, and Denny Aucoin's hand — broad, callused, a stranger's hand you were only renting — reaches out and taps the wheel and stops being yours to look at.

The stirring stops mid-circle. Starts again the other way.

You are five inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than you were a breath ago, and the wooden spoon in your hand is thin, current only where his own gelled spikes catch the light, wrist thinner, the whole geometry of the body wrong-familiar the way a rented car is wrong-familiar. One pan hisses in front of you. One plate sits on the counter to your right, white with a chipped rim. Salt shaker still in your left hand. You tip it over the pan without tasting first — that's not you deciding, that's just what the hand does, muscle ahead of mind — and then you reach up into the cabinet and bring down a second plate, and set it down next to the first, and only then does the wrongness of that register, a small cold click, like a door shutting somewhere behind your sternum.

It comes in through the shirt first. Thin gray cotton against your back, soft from a hundred washes, and it arrives with a whole Tuesday: him pulling it over his head in a room with a window unit rattling, a woman's voice down the hall saying *you're gonna wear that one again?* and him grinning with the lip ring catching light, saying *it's lucky*, and her saying *lucky for what* and him not answering because the answer was private, was about a delivery route and a tip that paid his rent that month. Sarah. Her name arrives with the shirt, easy as breathing, and behind her, further back, another name that still has weight to it though it shouldn't anymore — Brianna — and a kid's laugh that isn't in the room but lives in his chest anyway, a photo on a dresser he touches every morning without looking at it, the way you touch a doorframe on your way out.

The jeans are older, they came through the belt loop with a memory of a size he used to be able to zip without the extra breath in, and that's the body under it: skinny fat, a gut that surprises him in mirrors, calves and forearms wire-tight from hauling boxes up porch steps six days a week, freckles across his nose that girls always mention first, like they're the whole point of him. His jaw aches faintly, low-grade, from clenching it in his sleep, at the wheel, at customers who don't tip, at himself. His mouth wants a cigarette he had forty minutes ago. His mouth is doing something else too — chewing at the inside of his cheek, a habit that came in through his teeth rather than his hands, no key needed for that one, it was just there, waiting, part of the furniture of him.

The spoon gives you the job: eleven hours a day in the open back of a brown van, scanner heavy on his hip, boxes with strangers' names on them, a stoplight that's red more than it's green and a diner across from it that's been dark since before he had this route. The pan gives you tonight — alone, girlfriend working a double, kid at her mom's this week, and he told himself he'd cook something that wasn't cereal, and he almost managed it, got as far as searing the chicken, got as far as setting one plate down like a man eating alone eats — until his hand, without him, reached up and took down a second plate and set it beside the first, for no one, for a habit thirty seconds too old to know yet that it doesn't apply tonight.

That's the last of him you get. It comes with a feeling that isn't yours and you let it sit there anyway — small, stupid, tender — before you close your hand around the spoon and make it entirely your own.

You look down at your hand. Freckled knuckles, thin, the lip ring catching the stove light when you turn your head instinctically toward the window that isn't the one you had a second ago. Wrong hand. Wrong window. Right now.

You lift your eyes off it, into the kitchen light, and you say, to no one, in his voice: "Guess I'm not that hungry after all."