Kevin Minh Tran

You are in the prep cook's body, Travis, in Denver, and the kitchen is loud. For four minutes you have been standing at a steel table with a knife you do not know how to hold, and a man behind you is calling you chef like it is a joke. Your forearms are short and burned. Your head is cool where the shaved skin meets the air, and your feet ache. You were a prep cook for four minutes, and in that time you learned one thing: this body is good at being tired, and it is not enough.

What sent you back was small. A onion had been cut in front of you, and you could not make your eyes water. You stood there dry while everyone else wept, and you understood that you wanted a body that could be moved by something. That is all. You wipe the knife, you set it down, you open the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You spin.

Humid air. Evening comes down blue, and the streetlamp is already lit. You are standing on a sidewalk mid-pause, with weight on one leg, and a plastic handle in your right hand. The leash runs out ten feet to a small gray dog with its face in a hedge. The dog looks up past the hedge at you with its ears back.

His shirt is thin and soft against your shoulder blades. The memory comes up through it: this morning, the pocket tee, pulled from the dryer still warm, and the smell of it, and his left arm going through the sleeve with the tattoo crossing the inside of the elbow. He does not look at it. He knows what it says. A name and a date. Your thumb finds it through the cloth and you get her name, the one who got away, and the date, and a long drive with the windows down and her feet on the dash. It hurts in a flat, old, practical way, like a tooth he has stopped favoring.

The jeans are faded at the knee. Putting them on, he sat on the edge of a bed to do it, because his back is forty-four and a little stiff, and a small daughter's voice was calling from another room about shoes. One child. She is eight and she is the center of every day. A girlfriend is in there too, someone kind who texts him in the afternoon, and he is fond of her and careful with it.

The handle in your hand is warm. Your fingers are already doing something: your thumb has found a lighter in the front pocket and is flipping it, open, shut, open. He does not smoke. He never did. He keeps it for the sound of the little lid, a habit from a year he was nervous, and the click settles him. The click settles you.

The brown shoes are cracked at the toe. The belt sits low under a soft belly, and his legs are long and a little thin for the rest of him. Above you the lamp hums. The mole on your cheek feels warm.

You hold the leash. You wind it twice around your hand, and the dog learns your stride.

You look at your hand, long and brown and strange, turn it over, and lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long we get."