Kyle Branford

You are sitting in a patrol car outside a taquería on Fulton, and the radio is quiet, and that is the problem. Forty minutes ago you ran a plate for no reason except that your hands wanted something to do. You have been Raúl Figueroa for an hour and forty minutes and the body is fine — younger than most of what you've worn, good shoulders, a laugh he hasn't used yet that you can feel sitting in his chest like a held breath — but the life underneath it keeps surfacing in little unwanted pieces: a partner who texts and doesn't say what he means, a mother who calls twice a day, a badge that itches with a weight you didn't ask for and don't want to carry into whatever this shift turns into. You did not spin again out of hatred for him. You spun because the quiet in the car is the same quiet that was in the last body, and the one before that, and you have started to suspect the thing you are chasing isn't in any particular man, it is in the half-second before you know who you are. You take out your phone. The wheel is already loaded, the way it always is now, like it never stopped spinning since the first time.

Your thumb finds the site before your mind finishes the thought.

The tap is running and the sound of it is the first thing, water hitting porcelain in a key you don't recognize, and your mouth is full of foam, and your arm — heavier than Raúl's, older in the elbow — is already lifting the brush back to the molars on the other side, finishing a stroke you didn't start. You rinse once. You rinse again. The water swirls grey in a basin that has clearly held this exact grey a thousand mornings before this one, and you set the brush down bristles-up out of habit that isn't yours yet but is already moving your hand.

The shirt is what opens first — a soft olive tee, thin at the collar, and touching the hem where it's tucked into pajama pants running you sideways into a Sunday two years back, him doing the early service sound booth because Pastor Dave asked and nobody tells Pastor Dave no, the particular hush of a sanctuary at 6 a.m. before anyone else is in it. Then the tattoo. Your right forearm prickles where the ink sits — not your skin's memory, his — and it comes up fast and warm: a recruiter's office in Wasilla, nineteen years old, the smell of the shop after, the crest going on for a team he never even played for in college, just liked, just wanted on him forever because it felt like choosing something permanent when nothing else in his life was. Under it, paler, older ink he doesn't think about: an anchor, four years of a Navy he left without regret, four years that taught these shoulders how to carry weight without complaining about it, how this back can take a pallet jack's drag for ten hours straight and still stand up straight in the shower after.

The ring tan comes up through the faucet handle, of all things, the cold metal of it against his palm the way it used to sit against the gold. Her name arrives — not whole, just the shape of a kitchen, a year of silence at a table, the sound of a custody schedule read out loud by a mediator in a flat voice, two kids' names that land like stones, a boy and a girl he sees every other weekend and loves with an ache he carries low and quiet, the kind that doesn't announce itself except at exactly moments like this one, alone at a sink at an hour too early for anyone sane. He quit drinking before that fell apart, not after — some small grace he gave himself that didn't save anything but that he's still, somewhere, proud of.

The floor under his feet is cold through socks, and that cold drags up the whole apartment: plywood walls he put up himself behind a tarp-covered snowmobile he hasn't ridden since the divorce because riding it alone feels like admitting something. A warehouse badge on a lanyard hung on the doorknob, swinging slightly, and through it — the cavernous cold mouth of a loading dock, the particular ache that lives permanently now in his lower back from eleven years of boxes, the forklift beep he can hear even when it isn't running, coworkers' names, a thermos he never fills with anything but coffee because he gave up the rest of it years back too, one vice at a time, Lord willing.

It is dark outside the little window over the sink, dark in the particular way only an Anchorage winter morning is dark, no hint of the sun that is still hours off, and somewhere in that darkness is a shift that starts soon, boxes that don't care what he has or hasn't resolved about his life before he touches them.

You look down. His hands — thick-knuckled, a nail bed stained faint orange from some solvent, the ghost-pale band of unmarked skin on the ring finger catching the bathroom light. You turn the right one over slowly, watching the tattoo shift with the tendons.

"Didn't think it'd be you," you say to the mirror, to no one, to him, and you don't know yet if that's true or if it's just the first thing that came.