Kyle Ostrander

Marco Villagrana's hands are too small for the phone they're holding, and you have hated that for ten minutes straight. You are sitting on the edge of somebody else's unmade bed in Los Angeles, evening light going orange through blinds that are not yours to complain about, and everything in this apartment smells like developer fluid and old take-out. There's a unibrow in the mirror across the room that isn't going away no matter how long you sit here deciding. You spun once, you got heavy and short and thirty inches of studio equipment you don't know how to use, and it turns out that having a body is not the same as wanting to keep it. Boredom doesn't cover it exactly. It's more that ten minutes was enough time to learn you don't fit this one, and the wheel is right there on the laptop screen, still open in another tab, patient as a slot machine. You open vessel.cards again before you've finished the thought. You pay. You spin. Somewhere it lands.

The rain finds you first — not falling on you, but already on you, already down the back of a hood you didn't put up, already cold against a face turned into it on purpose. You are standing under a bus shelter that isn't in Los Angeles, in a body a full head taller than the one you just left and forty pounds lighter, weight balanced differently, feet planted wide in sneakers gone dark with water. Above you a sign reads 3 MIN in orange dots. Your hood is pushed back. Your face is up and open to the rain and you are not flinching from it, and for one full second you don't know why, because you didn't decide to like the rain — someone else did, a long time before this, and that decision is still sitting in the muscles of this face when you arrive in them.

Then it comes in through what's touching you, the way it always does.

The jacket first — damp nylon, the zipper cold where it rests against a throat gone soft with stubble he hasn't shaved in three days. A flash: hanging this jacket on a hook by a casino employee door, above a locker with his name taped inside in marker gone illegible from humidity. Kyle. Table 14. The itch of the felt under his palms, hour after hour, the particular ache that lives in a dealer's wrist from the same small motion ten thousand times a shift — cut, deal, sweep, cut, deal, sweep — and the migraine that starts behind the left eye on the bad nights, always the left, always around hour six, when the pit boss's radio squawks too close to his head. This body carries that ache in it right now, low and familiar, like weather.

The t-shirt — Zeppelin, soft from a hundred washes, worn under the jacket because Miami rain doesn't care what season it decided to be. A whole morning comes with it: standing in front of a closet that used to have two names' worth of hangers in it and now only has his, picking this shirt because it was the only clean one, because laundry is a thing you do for one now instead of two. His hand finds his own ring finger without meaning to — an old habit, checking for a weight that left over a year ago — and there's the pale stripe of skin where the band used to sit, and under it a marriage that ended without a single dramatic reason anyone could point to, just two people who stopped reaching for each other one ordinary week and never started again. He still says her name sometimes to the bathroom mirror, testing how it sounds now. It sounds fine. That's almost the worst part.

The jeans, soaked through at the cuff, worn thin at the knee from crouching to rack chips off the floor when a stack goes over. Every double shift is in the fabric somewhere — the good nights when a table runs hot and generous and the tips stack up warm in his pocket, twenty-five, thirty grand of it now sitting patient in an account he doesn't touch except to watch the number, quiet proof he's fine, he's fine, he's completely fine. The bad nights too, the ones that end with him standing exactly like this, alone at a bus stop in the rain because his car's in the shop and he didn't feel like calling anyone, because there isn't really anyone left in this city to call at this hour who wouldn't ask him why he sounds like that.

The sneakers underfoot, gone heavy with water — five foot five of him standing solid and unhurried in them, a body used to being on its feet twelve hours at a stretch, quick clean hands that know exactly how a deck feels between them without looking, freckles dotted warm across a face that used to get called cute by a woman who isn't around anymore to call it anything. He is twenty-six and none of this — not the marriage, not the migraines, not the money quietly compounding, not the cigar he'll smoke alone on the balcony later out of habit more than pleasure — none of it required a single other person tonight. That's why he was standing here liking the rain on his face instead of ducking from it. There was nowhere he needed to be dry for.

The board clicks: 2 MIN. It doesn't matter to you. You were never getting on that bus.

You bring your hand up out of the rain and turn it palm-up, watching water run off fingers that are longer than the ones you had ten minutes ago, freckled at the knuckle, a ring's ghost pale across one of them. You flex it once, testing the unfamiliar economy of it, how light it feels after Marco's stubby, careful weight.

You lift your eyes into the wet gray evening, rain still running down a face that isn't fighting it, and you say, out loud, to no one waiting under the shelter with you:

"Bus can go without me."