Kevin Shiozaki

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Gregory Stennis's hands smell like jet fuel and hand soap, and they are not interesting anymore. Three minutes in this body and already the itch is back, that particular boredom that has nothing to do with Gregory and everything to do with you — the goatee in the bathroom mirror, the blue eyes that aren't yours, the garage smell baked into the skin. You spun for an aircraft mechanic's hands and got them, and already they're just hands. You didn't come back for Gregory. You came back because wanting is the only thing that's actually yours across forty-six men, and it never once asks permission before it returns. Saturday evening, Denver, the light going orange through a kitchen window that belongs to a stranger who is currently nowhere, who will never be anywhere again. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loading before you've decided anything, the way it always is.

You click. It spins. It lands.

The kitchen is gone and a different kitchen is around you, darker, narrower, a window full of blue late evening instead of orange. Your thumb — his thumb — is lifted off a phone screen, frozen an inch above the glass, above a watch that costs more than this whole crooked galley kitchen is worth. The hand turns the phone face-down on the counter by itself, like it already knew to, and does not pick it back up. You are sitting on a stool that creaks. You are eighteen years old in a stranger's weight, which is lighter than Gregory's, tighter through the shoulders, younger in a way that has nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with how little the joints complain.

The shirt is what opens first — long-sleeved, soft, worn thin at the cuffs — and it comes in through the forearms before it comes in as a thought: Kevin pulling it on this morning in a room with a cracked blind, the half-sleeve on his right arm catching the hem a little the way it always does, he has to feed his elbow through first or the ink drags on the cotton. The cross and the praying hands, done two summers ago in a shop in Sunset Park with a guy named Freddy who talked the whole time about his kid's baptism, Kevin wincing and trying not to show it to the two other customers waiting, his mother's rosary somewhere in a drawer three blocks from here, and Kevin not really a churchgoer but not really not one either, something that lives in him lower than belief, more like a frequency he leaves the radio tuned to just in case. He didn't go to Mass this year. He said a thing under his breath once this week anyway, over a double-parked truck and a late package and a dog that wouldn't stop barking at him on Nostrand.

The jeans next, dark, cheap, washed too many times — and with them a whole stretch of this week comes back smelling like cardboard and cold air: the van's back doors sliding open on their track at six in the morning, the handheld scanner's weight settling into his palm like it belongs there, the specific ache behind his right knee from climbing in and out of the cargo box forty, fifty times a shift, stairs in buildings with no working elevator, a doorman on Henry Street who always calls him "boss" and tips him two dollars like it's a secret between them. Jace, his supervisor, riding him about scan times. The gum — always the gum, a fresh piece going in the second the last one loses its flavor, his jaw working it without him noticing, a tell his girlfriend Priya teases him about, *you're not even hungry, you're just nervous*, and he laughs it off because she's usually right.

Priya. The thought of her comes in gentler than the rest, through nothing you're touching, just surfacing on its own the way the biggest things do — eight months now, her laugh too loud for the movies, the way she falls asleep against his shoulder on the train and he lets his arm go numb rather than wake her. And under that, older, quieter: Ana, the one before her, two years of a relationship that ended sideways and still visits him sometimes at two in the morning for no reason he can name, not grief exactly, more like a door he closed that still has a draft coming through it.

The stool under you, the counter's chipped edge against his forearm, the dark window holding his own reflection faint over the glow of a single bulb on a cord — all of it his, all of it ordinary, a rent he can't quite make some months, a phone screen he was scrolling fifteen seconds ago full of a watch worth more than this whole apartment, some fantasy he indulges and despises himself for indulging, the particular shame of wanting a thing that expensive on a delivery driver's hours. Eighteen years of being careful with money arriving all at once, heavy, and you feel it the way you'd feel a held breath.

You turn the hand over on the counter. Young knuckles, a faint callus already forming at the base of the fingers from the scanner's grip, no stubble because he shaved this morning out of habit more than need. You lift your eyes off it into the dark window, where his reflection and nobody else's looks back.

"Not yet," you say, to the glass, to the dead phone, to no one. "Not yet, kid."