Kevin Struzik

The lot is empty except for his cruiser and the long light coming sideways down Main, catching the diner's dead neon and doing nothing with it. He's talking to a screen propped on the hood, some department liaison two hundred miles away walking him through a policy update nobody asked for, and the connection is doing what small-town internet does at dusk — stuttering, dropping, rebuilding his voice a half-second behind his mouth.

You come in on the stutter.

The pixels on the laptop are the last thing you see from where you were, a blocky approximation of a face dissolving into static, and then you are behind his eyes instead of in front of them, and the parking lot rushes in from every direction at once: gravel dust, the smell of hot vinyl off the dash, a radio clipped to a shoulder that isn't yours yet and is now.

His hand is still raised, mid-gesture, making some point about report formatting that you don't finish. The laptop screen goes dark like it's been unplugged, though it hasn't, and for a second the only light on his face is the sky doing its last orange thing over the hardware store across the street.

You feel him before you feel yourself. Fifty years in this body, all of it still humming in the muscle — the low ache of a shoulder that's thrown a few punches and taken a couple back, forearms corded from nothing dramatic, just years, just the belt's weight riding his hips like it grew there. Short hair gone the color of dry wheat. Brown eyes that have looked at this same stoplight change color eleven thousand times without once being surprised by it.

You test the hand. It closes into a fist easy enough, familiar with the motion, unfamiliar with the intention.

Somewhere behind you a screen door bangs — nobody, or a cat, or the diner's ghost of a sign buzzing in its socket. The stoplight up the block cycles green to yellow to red for no one. You lean where he was leaning, against the warm flank of the cruiser, and you let the quiet of the street press in against a stranger's chest like it's checking your work.

He has a woman waiting on him tonight, you know that the way you know his radio code and the ache behind his left knee — not remembered, just present, sitting in the body like sediment. She'll ask how the call went. You'll say fine. You'll mean nothing by it, because you are not troubled by things that aren't yours, and none of this, not one square foot of it, is yours.

You push off the car. The gravel is real under boots that have broken in a thousand dawns like this one. You walk toward the diner's dead sign because it's the only thing on the street still trying to say something, and you stand under it a while, breathing a fifty-year-old rhythm, waiting on the one appointment you didn't have to make.

Sleep, when it finally comes for him, will come easy, the way it does for men who've spent their whole lives being tired in the same honest way. You'll be gone by the second breath of it — already unstitched from the calluses, the shoulder ache, the small-town quiet — long before his eyes open again as only his.