Lonnie Prescott

Seven minutes ago you were nobody, and then you were a management consultant with a scar through one eyebrow, standing in his own kitchen at sunrise with a cup of coffee going cold in a hand that wasn't yours yet either. It is Sunday, early, Miami quiet in the way only money can buy quiet. You spent those seven minutes doing the math a person does when a new skin doesn't fit the way the last one did — tall, soft around the middle in a way that isn't quite soft, a scar that itches when you think about it too hard. He has a closet full of linen shirts and a job that pays him to say smart things in rooms, and none of it moves you. Seven minutes was long enough to know you don't want to be him for the length of a life. You want the chair to still be warm, not cold. You open the site again on his phone, thumb clumsy with someone else's hands, and you spin.

The wheel doesn't travel. There is no hallway, no falling, no between. One instant you are standing in a kitchen with a mug sweating onto marble, and the next the floor under you is gravel, not tile, and it is cold the way Texas gets cold at night even when the days are hot, and you are mid-stride, one shoe scuffing, and then it isn't. The stumble that was already happening finishes itself into a catch against the fender of a parked Buick, and your hand — his hand — closes on the wet chrome of the side mirror, and the next forty steps come out level and quiet underneath you like you'd planned them. Jacket hanging open. A street you've never stood on, shut-up storefronts, a light buzzing under a motel awning somewhere behind you. At the corner your feet decide, without you, to turn left.

That's him. Not you yet, not really — his legs doing what sober legs do when the body has more sense than the man riding it. You feel the ponytail pull at the nape of your neck. You feel average, unremarkable, five foot six of a man who has never once stood out in a room, and there's a comfort in it you didn't expect, coming off a body that was seven minutes of standing out.

Then the shirt. It's against your back the way it's been against his all day, and it gives first: a Tuesday morning, fluorescent light over a bathroom mirror, buttoning this same collar with the pen already clipped in the pocket because if it isn't clipped before he leaves the house he'll lose it by ten. Flannel, soft from washing, a little thin at the elbows. He bought six of these shirts at once four years ago because deciding what to wear was wasting fifteen minutes he didn't have, and he's been rotating them ever since without buying more, and there's a private, unbothered satisfaction in that, a problem solved once and never revisited.

The receipts in his fist — you feel them before you know what they are, a fan of paper gone soft at the folds, one register tape curling to the floor — and they bring back the whole shoebox they came from, a feed store's worth of chits and a rancher's invoices spread under a desk lamp on a Saturday, the particular pleasure of a column that balances, the particular relief of closing a drawer on numbers that finally agree with each other. He is good at this. Nobody has ever told him he is good at this. He has never needed them to.

The jeans remember a woman two Augusts back, a waitress at the diner off the highway who liked him well enough for six weeks and then didn't, and the ache of that is small and old and mostly gone, folded in with the denim at the knee where it's worn thin. The boots remember the gravel road to a house that is dark right now, a mile and a half further on, and a dog that will not wake for him because the dog is old and deaf and sleeps through everything, and that is somehow the saddest and most ordinary fact in him, bigger than the woman, bigger than any of it: a house with nobody in it waiting up.

His fingers, loose at his side, want to drum against his thigh — they do it without him, four beats and a pause, an old tic with no song attached to it anymore, just motion for its own sake, the body keeping time for nobody. You feel how little nicotine or liquor has ever touched him; tonight is the exception, the few times a year, a work thing at a bar he didn't want to go to, and the whiskey in him now is thin and already souring into a headache behind the eyes that are, for one more second, still his.

Then the two in the morning catches up — not where he is, but when, and it sits wrong and you let it sit wrong, because he does the books for three outfits that run cattle and one that runs trucks through the night, and twice a month he keeps a buyer's hours instead of his own, up past midnight reconciling fuel receipts by desk lamp, and tonight that bled into a bar and the bar bled into this long wet walk the scenic way because the short way takes him past a house he doesn't like passing at night for no reason he's ever named out loud.

You feel all thirty-nine years of him standing still under a streetlamp that isn't there in this block — average, unremarkable, hurting faintly behind the eyes, calloused across two fingers where a pen sits for ten hours a day, nothing wrong with him and nothing special either, and that is the whole gift of him, the reason the wheel in your hand a minute ago felt heavier than this one does: nobody is going to come looking for this man tonight, and nobody did.

You stop at the corner that isn't the way home. You lift both hands in front of your face, the receipts still fanned in one of them, going soft with the rain, and you turn them palm up, palm down, like you're checking they came back the right way round.

"Didn't used to drink that much," you say, out loud, to the empty street, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's him talking or you borrowing him to say it, and you don't know how long you get to wonder.