Kyle Ahlgren

Vincent Casas has been sitting in this Impala for forty minutes, and forty minutes in this body is a different thing than forty minutes used to be. The knees ache first, then the lower back, then the specific tiredness behind the eyes that comes from being forty-four in a frame built for someone shorter, older, worn down by thirty years of the job before you ever climbed into it. The radio on the dash mutters case numbers that don't matter. You are supposed to be watching an apartment building on Alvarado. You are watching your own hand instead — small, freckled, gray hairs on the knuckle, a stranger's hand you've been wearing for less than a minute of your own life and three hundred and some hours of his. It is a good body. It is not the point. The point is that it is Monday, midday, and the boredom has a texture to it you recognize, the specific itch that means the wheel is still open on the phone in the passenger seat, glowing, patient, and you already know you're going to pick it up before you admit you've decided to.

You don't examine why. You never really do. There's a rule you've made for yourself somewhere around spin forty that you don't ask the question of *why not stay*, because the answer is always the same shape: because there's another one. Because Vincent Casas, aching knees and all, is just a man sitting in a car, and there will always be another man sitting somewhere doing something you haven't felt yet. You open vessel.cards. The wheel is already spinning in your mind before your thumb touches it.

—

The television cuts to a bright frame — some rescue montage, an ad maybe, you'll never know which — and in the half-second of white light you are sitting up straight in a body that outweighs the last one by eighty pounds, your spine finding a posture it didn't ask for, a remote settling out of your hand onto the arm of a couch you've never touched before. The room is dim around you, blinds down against a glare you can feel even through them. Your feet are bare on a floor that ticks warm underneath — not carpet, not tile, wood on posts, the particular give of a house that breathes with the ground under it. Your chest is heavier than it's ever been. You do not laugh at whatever joke just played on the screen, and something in the body seems to notice that absence before you do, a small dumb confusion like a held breath with nowhere to go.

The shirt is against your back first — a soft gray sweatshirt gone thin at the collar — and it gives you a morning: him pulling it over his head three days ago after a double shift, dropping straight into the couch without eating, his wife's voice from the kitchen asking if he wanted rice and him saying not yet, not yet, in a voice thick with the kind of tired that lives in the shoulders. The couch under you is the same leather Kyle Ahlgren picked out four years back on a day off, hauling it in through a doorway too narrow for it with his brother-in-law cursing the whole time, and there is a warmth in that memory, an ordinary male pride at having wedged something heavy through a space it didn't want to go.

Your left hand finds the ring without meaning to — thumb rubbing the band the way his thumb has rubbed it ten thousand times without him noticing he was doing it — and that single motion opens a wedding on a lawn somewhere green and rented, her dress catching wind, his mother crying more than anyone, him sweating through a shirt too tight in the shoulders and not caring at all. Then further in, a hospital room, fluorescent and too cold, a nurse putting something small and furious into his arms for the first time, his own voice cracking on a name he'd practiced saying for months and still got wrong at the exact moment it counted, and the feeling that comes with it isn't yours, it's his, love with the varnish still wet on it.

The tattoo on your arm is under a sleeve you can't see but can feel, ropes of ink he got at twenty with two friends from the docks, an anchor bold and a little crooked because the artist had been drinking and none of them cared, and it opens onto the gantry crane, the container yard at five in the morning, the particular ache that lives permanently now in his lower back and both knees from lifting things no man his age should still be lifting bare-handed, and under the ache a competence, hands that know without being told how to read a swinging load, how to signal a crane operator with two fingers, how to plant his feet so nothing shifts him. He has never had a drink in his life and never wanted one, has never smoked, has watched half the yard kill themselves slowly on both and felt, quietly, superior about it, then guilty for feeling superior. His nails are bitten to the quick — you can feel that now too, the rough edge of each one against your thumb, a habit he's never once caught himself in the act of.

Outside somewhere a rooster is going, wrong for the hour but Honolulu doesn't care, and the red dirt yard beyond the blinds throws its glare in under the crack at the bottom of the window even with the lights off, the whole house holding its breath against a heat that hasn't started yet. He should be at the dock. He is on a stretch of nights this month, came home at seven, should be asleep, and instead sat down in front of a rerun because his body wouldn't settle and his wife had already left for her shift and the baby was with her mother, and there is something almost holy in that, an ordinary Monday morning alone in a dim room, unwatched, unremarkable, his.

You look at your hands. Thick fingers, bitten nails, a wedding band worn smooth on the inside where nobody else would ever check. You turn the right one over once, like you're checking it's real, then lift your eyes to the dark television glass where a stranger's reflection is looking back out at you.

"Didn't even laugh that time," you say, quiet, to no one, and reach for the remote like a man who has all the time left in the world.