Kevin Stallard

The chair still smells like mint and burnt enamel. You're sitting in Marvin Otis's little back office, the one with the diplomas nobody reads, and the lazy eye keeps drifting on you when you look in the mirror by the sink, like even his own reflection can't be trusted to hold still. Sixty-four years old, skinny as a coat hanger, and every joint in him complains when he stands. You've been him less than a minute and already you know why you're leaving: not the eye, not the hands that shake a little now over composite resin, but the calendar on the wall. Booked out four months. Little kids' mouths, molars, root canals, the whole grinding sameness of it stretching out ahead like a hallway with no doors. You did not spin the wheel three hundred and thirty-three times to sit in a hallway.

Your phone — his phone — is already open to the site. The wheel sits there mid-spin from muscle memory, colors bleeding into each other. You don't even let it finish deciding anything for you. You press to spin again, thumb barely inside the frame, gum-free, mint-numb, patient zero of your own boredom.

—

The arm on the mattress draws itself up out of the dark and folds over a chest that isn't sunken anymore, it's soft, padded, a working man's stomach under a plain t-shirt gone thin at the collar. Breath that was ragged goes even in one pull. Streetlight through the gap in the curtain lays one clean gold line down the wall and across the sheets, and for a second that's the only thing in the world — the line of light, the smell of cheap detergent, weight, real weight, pressing you down into a mattress that gives more than Marvin's bones ever let it.

It is the middle of a Monday where you left, and the middle of a Monday here too, but shifted — an hour that has no business holding a grown man face-down and dead asleep unless something in his week runs backward. It does. You don't know that yet. You will.

—

The shirt is what starts it — worn cotton dragging over skin still faintly damp from a night's sweat, and touching it, wearing it, is enough. A flash: pulling this exact shirt over your head at six that morning, still dark, before the sun did whatever it does over Eastern Kentucky ridgelines, before you drove the truck down to the gym for the early open mat because two boys on the team have regionals coming and one of them, the smaller one, reminds you so much of your own son at that age it makes something twist behind your ribs every single time he shoots a bad double and you have to correct his hips instead of just hugging him.

You are Kevin Stallard, and the name arrives with the shirt, plain as a nail. Forty-three years old. You coach wrestling in a gym that still has the old paint scheme from before the county consolidated the schools, and the whistle — you feel for it out of habit, a phantom weight against your sternum, though it isn't around your neck now, it's hanging on a hook by the door with the lanyard twisted, the way it always ends up twisted no matter how you hang it.

The mattress under you gives another memory, this one heavier, slower: your ex, years back now, the smell of her shampoo somehow still ambient in this room though she hasn't set foot in it in three years, and the two kids who stay with her most weeks but sleep in the second bedroom down the hall on the weeks they're with you, the one with the bunk bed you built yourself out of pressure-treated lumber because the store-bought ones looked like they'd fold under a decent takedown. You love them in the specific, exhausted way of a man who is mostly alone now and has made a kind of peace with it, though the peace has edges.

Your body under the sheet is heavier than it used to be — dad bod, everyone's word for it, never yours — and it aches in the low back from decades of mat time, decades of demonstrating a stance you can still hit but that costs you more than it used to. Your jaw works even in sleep, a phantom motion, because your mouth wants gum that isn't there; you quit the cigarettes eleven days ago and your whole nervous system keeps reaching for something to do instead, and gum is the only thing that's stood between you and losing your mind in a car line or a faculty meeting. Communion on Sunday, mouth empty for once, is the only hour all week your jaw goes still.

There was a bottle last night — there's most nights a bottle — and the memory of it comes up sour and half-formed: sitting on the porch past the treeline in the dark, the cable footbridge somewhere down past the trees creaking under nobody's weight, just the wind finding it, and you drinking past sense because Sunday night is when you miss her worst, the old one, the one who left and took a version of your life with her that you still sometimes reach for like a phantom limb. That's why you're asleep at an hour a normal man would be at his desk — you close the gym late, you drink later, and Monday mornings you are simply not available to the world until the world insists.

—

You look at your hands — his hands, blond-haired at the knuckle, a plain band still worn out of habit though the marriage that gave it meaning ended years ago, calluses along the palm heel from mats and rope and a hundred thousand handshakes with other men's sons — and you turn them over slow in the striped light, watching them like they might not answer to you.

Then you lift your eyes toward the gap in the curtain, toward wherever the camera of the world happens to be pointed, and you say, low, a little wondering, chewing on nothing:

"Hell of a Monday."