Kyle Pruett

The glass shop smells like cut aluminum and cold coffee, and you have been Danny Osaki for two minutes, standing at a workbench with a suction cup still gripping a pane you don't remember picking up. Your hands — his hands — are steady from ten years of glazing, and that steadiness is the whole problem. You spun for this precision once, thought it would feel like something. It feels like Tuesday. Whatever made you spin forty-eight times before is already itching behind Danny's eyes, and the phone in his pocket, when you thumb it open, shows the site sitting there patient as a church door. You don't put the glass down carefully. You just stop holding it, and it isn't your problem anymore, because you're already gone, already spinning, already somewhere in Kansas at the same instant it is Monday afternoon in Pittsburgh.

You land sitting forward on a couch that smells like spilled Mountain Dew and old smoke, thumb already on a controller's volume rocker, adjusting it with a precision no man three beers deep should have. On the screen, a crowd roars a second time — replay — and the ball hangs in the net. Your mouth is dry. There's a warm can sweating in your other hand. Somewhere behind your sternum is the specific, low-grade dread of a body that has been drinking since before noon and calling it fine.

The can is the first thing. Warm aluminum, a dent where a thumbnail worried it, and it opens onto not memory exactly but weather — three years of afternoons just like this, curtains pulled against a sun that never seems to leave in July, cut wheat stubble gone gold-gray outside, a thunderhead stacked up black on the horizon like it's been rehearsing since April. Kyle streams nights, mostly — some overlap crowd back east who like a Kansas boy grinding ranked matches into 2 a.m. — which is why noon finds him half a beer past sleeping, why the room is dim at what should be bright day, blackout curtains doing their one job. The dread sharpens: a doctor's office, a script for something with a name he mumbles instead of says, an app on his phone that buzzes reminders he mostly ignores. Better lately. Not fixed. Never fixed, just managed, like the drinking is managed, which is to say it isn't, not really, and everyone including him knows it and nobody says it outright, not even the girlfriend whose hair tie is on the coffee table next to the chip bags.

The headphones are still around his neck from streaming earlier — you feel the ghost of a Masters of the Universe shirt from a photo shoot he did once for a gaming site, a black tee gone soft-thin from washing, worn because it made him laugh, He-Man ironic and a little sincere at the same time, the way his whole channel is. That shirt this morning went on the same way it always does — right sleeve first, always, a habit from some ex-girlfriend's superstition he adopted and never let go of even after she left — cargo pants next, the left pocket already sagging with a lighter he doesn't use anymore, three years quit and still can't throw the lighter out. Muscle memory of striking it, thumb rolling the wheel, a small grief every single time he doesn't.

The couch under him is the one he and Megan bought secondhand and joked about fumigating first. She's at work now — some daylight job, the kind with an actual lunch break, the kind he gave up trying to hold onto years back when the channel started paying almost enough to matter. Almost. Five figures a good year, less most. She loves him anyway, or loves him still, which in this house are sometimes the same sentence and sometimes not, and there's a particular ache that comes through the couch cushions themselves — every argument they've had happened sitting right here, and every making-up too.

The game replay ends. Real score stands. Somewhere in the stubble-flat distance thunder finally answers the black sky that's been threatening all through his nap, and the room goes a notch dimmer, yellow light through the curtain edge curdling toward storm-green.

You turn the can over in his hand, feel how light it's gone, how his fingers already know the shape of setting it down without looking, twenty years of practice aimed at nothing.

You look up into the dead controller camera clipped above the TV, streaming light still blinking red though the session ended hours of drinking ago, and you say, "Chat, I don't even remember the goal" — and you don't know yet if that's a joke or the truest thing anyone in this room has said all day.