Kevin Sato

Sunday, late morning, Miami, and Anthony Deluca's body is doing something Anthony Deluca's body has done every day for twelve hours and forty-six minutes: standing in a kitchen that isn't yours, drinking coffee that tastes like ash because you didn't sleep, because you don't sleep in these, not really, not the first night. The wrestling mats are rolled up in the gym across town, waiting for a Monday practice you already know you won't be at. You liked the size of him. You liked the forearms, the easy authority he walked around in, boys twelve years old looking up at him like he was something built rather than born. But greatness gets boring fast when it isn't yours to begin with — muscle memory that isn't memory at all, a name people call out in the street that fits him and not you. You have been him for less than a day and you are already thinking about the next face. That's the truth under it, the one you wouldn't say to anyone: it was never really about being someone. It's about not staying anyone. You open the laptop. The wheel loads, spinning lazily on its axis before you've even touched it, and you touch it.

The tap is running before you're behind his eyes, and then it's running and you're there. The toothbrush is between his teeth, foam gone thin and grey at the corner of his mouth, and the last stroke — his, not yours — is caught mid-pull along the top row. You finish it out of some reflex that isn't a decision, then start the other side, slower, working the back molars like you're testing the hinge of the jaw before you trust it. The mirror in front of you holds a face you have never worn: black hair cropped close with the fringe combed forward, low over the brow, and under it a chin split by a cleft so clean it looks stamped rather than grown. Early light through a frosted window. A tiled bathroom, someone else's toothpaste, someone else's grey water sitting in the glass by the tap, the kind you don't throw out because why would you, it's just water. You rinse. Rinse again. Stand the brush up, bristles skyward, out of habit that is already becoming yours because it was always going to be his.

The shirt is what opens first — no shirt yet, actually, just the sweatpants, waistband loose and worn soft, and under your bare foot the closed lid of the toilet, cool through the sock you're not wearing. Bare feet. A memory arrives with the drop in temperature: him barefoot on this same lid a hundred mornings, balancing to reach the mirror without leaning on the pedestal sink that wobbles if you put weight on the rim. The sink drips at the joint. He's told the landlord twice.

Then the gray-water glass gives you more: an ex, curly-haired, laughing at him for keeping his toothbrush in that grease-yellow tumbler instead of buying a holder, six dollars at the drugstore, and him saying he liked things that had been used, that a fresh toothbrush cup felt like starting over and he was bad at starting over. She left in March. Not dramatically — a slow leak of a thing, two people who loved each other at the wrong speeds. He still has her voice memos on his phone he hasn't deleted. He tells himself it's because deleting takes a step he hasn't gotten to.

The chest under your own hand, when you touch it without thinking — checking, the way you always check a new body — gives you the tattoo before you even see it: the swallow and the rose at his collarbone, first piece he ever got, seventeen years old with a fake ID and a shop three towns over that didn't ask enough questions. Bold lines, colors already fading toward pastel at the edges the way American traditional does, honestly, the way it's supposed to. He remembers the buzz of it more than the pain — how the vibration climbed up through his sternum and made his teeth feel loose, how proud he was walking out, how his mother didn't speak to him for two days when she saw it at Thanksgiving. She came around. She always comes around, quietly, by bringing food instead of saying sorry.

The sleeves — full sleeves, both arms, snakes and daggers and a peony that took four sessions — arrive next, not through cloth but through his own hands, the ones he draws with, needles and thumb-worn grip, six years of muscle telling you without asking that this body knows how to hold a machine steady over someone's skin for four hours without a tremor. It knows how to talk a nervous nineteen-year-old through his first piece. It knows the particular ache in the lower back from leaning over a reclined chair since two in the afternoon, and — here it is, the reason the hour sits sideways in your head — it knows the ache of still being awake at closing, of a Saturday appointment that ran until 2 a.m. because the guy wanted a full back panel and wouldn't stop when common sense said stop. Phoenix is barely past dawn and this body is only just getting to sleep in it, which is why the morning outside the window feels less like morning and more like the tail end of a very long night, brushing his teeth on the way down instead of the way up.

The gravel yard behind the shop, the saguaros he can see from the break room window, blinding two-o'clock light on client days — none of that is here yet, just this small tiled room and the smell of mint and old pipes, but it's enough. It's already enough. You know the loneliness in this one, mild and unclaimed, evangelical mother two towns over still praying for him out loud at dinner, a vape pen on the counter he'll reach for the second he's done here, single because he hasn't figured out yet whether he wants to be otherwise.

You look down. The hand holding the toothbrush isn't a hand you recognize, thinner through the wrist than the one you had an hour ago in another time zone, ink climbing the forearm in shapes that were somebody's decisions and now, apparently, yours to carry around.

You lift your eyes to the mirror and say, quiet, mostly to the fogged glass: "Okay. Let's see what you've got."