Kevin Zhuang

You have been Dustin Halbrook for one minute, and one minute is long enough to know he is a mistake.

You are standing in a Phoenix precinct locker room, eighteen years old in this borrowed body, gray eyes stinging under fluorescent light, and the badge on the belt hook feels like a joke somebody handed you mid-punchline. Six-foot skinny frame, a rookie's uniform still creased from the store, and already there's a sergeant's voice down the hall barking a name that isn't going to mean anything to you in about four seconds. You didn't even get to feel him graduate the academy. You got the tail end of a shift nobody wants, standing in a room that smells like Lysol and other men's deodorant, and something in you — some part that has done this forty-six times now — says no, not this one, not tonight. You want your hands on something. You want sawdust, not paperwork. The phone is already out, thumb finding the site without needing to look, the wheel spinning on a screen no one else in this locker room could ever explain to you fast enough before it lands.

It lands on blue light and a body already lying down.

You are on your side in the dark, weight sunk into a mattress with no frame under it, and there's a phone six inches from your face throwing a cold rectangle of light across your cheek. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll. Then it isn't — it moves again, faster now, flicking past a video of somebody's dog, past a meme he'd have laughed at, steady in a way his thumb never was, because his thumb hesitated and yours does not. You feel the gap in your teeth before you feel anything else, tongue finding it without being asked, a smooth worn notch that has been there his whole life. Skinny. Twenty. A body that has done real work, and you can feel that in the forearm holding the phone up — a low ache sitting in it, day-old, honest.

The room announces itself before he does. Carpet under your bare feet where they hang off the mattress edge. A window unit somewhere behind you ticking as it cools. The shirt against your back is a soft gray tee gone thin at the shoulders, and it gives you the morning — sleeve over sleeve, quick, unbidden — him pulling it on in a rowhouse bedroom with the blinds still down, humming nothing, already thinking about the site. Grabbing the vest off the doorknob on his way past. The tool belt going on last, buckled without looking, because his hands have done it every morning for two years and don't need his eyes.

More comes; you don't reach for it, it just arrives, the way it always does, riding in on what your skin is touching. The mattress under you smells like fabric softener and a little like drywall dust that never fully leaves a man who does this for a living, and that smell drags in a whole afternoon — him on a ladder, second-floor framing on Tasker Street, sun coming sideways through joists that don't have walls yet, sawdust turning gold in the light, somebody's radio playing Spanish pop three studs over. He is good at this. His hands know stud spacing without a tape measure half the time, know the weight of a hammer's swing so well it barely registers as effort — this is what his body is *for*, and there's a clean, uncomplicated pride sitting under the ache in the shoulders.

There's a girl in it too — a flash of her laughing at something on this same mattress, her feet in his lap, gum-chewing quiet between them because he's always chewing something, jaw working even when his mind's elsewhere, an old habit that isn't nicotine and never was. No ex worth the name. No ring yet, but the shape of one sitting somewhere in the future of these memories, unclaimed. A comfortable little apartment bought with framing money and overtime, nothing flashy, a life assembled plank by plank the way he assembles everything else.

You feel how young the body is — twenty, skinny, a little sunburned across the back of the neck, forearms stronger than the rest of him, everything else still catching up. Nothing hurts that shouldn't. Nothing is missing that he'd miss.

You bring your own hand up in front of your face — his hand, thin-fingered, calluses along the base of each finger, a fleck of old paint under one thumbnail that no amount of showering ever quite gets — and you turn it over slowly in the blue light like you're checking it's real.

"There you are," you say, quiet, to no one, and the gap in the teeth shows when you say it.