Marco Villaseñor

The site loads slow on a laptop balanced on your knee, the wheel rendered in gold like it's trying too hard, and you almost close the tab out of old habit before you remember this one isn't a joke, isn't a thread, isn't a fan wiki for a movie that never got made. It's Thursday, the middle of the morning, nothing on, the kind of blank stretch where wanting something is easier than naming why. You've wanted this since you were a kid watching a body-swap movie way too many times, since every story you ever read where someone wakes up behind a different face. You never thought it would be a button. You press it anyway.

It spins.

You are standing. That's the first thing — the standing, the weight of it, the way a body this size holds itself without asking permission. There's a fork in your hand, stopped an inch from your mouth, and a plastic container of something with rice in it, and a coat still on your shoulders even though you're inside, even though it's warm. The kitchen light is yellow and small over the sink. Outside the window it's full dark, Atlanta-dark, heavy-summer-air dark, and you understand with a lag like thunder after lightning that where you came from it was morning and here it is late enough on a Wednesday to be alone with it.

The fork goes down. You didn't decide that — or you did, in the half-second it takes a new hand to learn its own weight — and it sets itself on the counter with a small metal sound. You shrug the coat off. It slides down arms that are thick through the forearm, corded with a kind of strength that doesn't look like a gym, looks like a trade. You sit on the stool tucked against the counter's edge, low enough that your knees complain, and you finish the container in even mouthfuls, and you're looking at nothing in the dark window, at a reflection that isn't giving you back a face you recognize, because you never had one to begin with.

The coat is the first door. It's heavy in a way that has memory folded into the weight of it, canvas gone soft at the elbows, and when your fingers brush the zipper pull a morning comes up out of nowhere: cold enough for breath to show, a driveway, a truck with a bad heater, the smell of coffee going lukewarm in a thermos wedged between the seats. Marco. The name arrives with the jacket, the way a smell arrives before the memory does. Marco pulling this coat on over a flannel, over a gray shop shirt, doing it in the dark of a bedroom so as not to wake somebody who isn't there anymore — an old year, that one, an old ache, filed and worn smooth.

The shirt against your back gives you more, sleeve by sleeve, the plaid one under the coat, buttoned crooked at the collar because he'd done it half-asleep at five that morning, standing in front of a dresser with a hood taped over one drawer that never closes right. He'd pulled the flannel on, then the Carhartt over it, then patted the left pocket automatically for the ring he isn't wearing but always checks for anyway, a habit with no ring left to explain it — an engagement that ended two Aprils ago, a woman named Renata who is still, if he is honest with himself in kitchens like this one, the size and shape of what got away. His hands remember turning a ring over and over without looking at it, worrying a groove that was never there, some phantom motion left behind like a limb.

The counter under your forearm is scarred laminate, and touching it brings the shop instead — the actual one, today's, this Wednesday's, sparks still ticking as they cool on concrete, the visor flipped up on his head, the particular ache low in his back from bending over a jig for nine hours, a good ache, an earned one, the kind that means the seams held and the inspector didn't have to come back twice. His hands know a torch the way another man's hands know a steering wheel — without watching themselves do it. Calloused across the palm, one thumbnail permanently a little dark, a burn scar he doesn't have because the facts don't give you one, but the *habit* of care around open flame is there anyway, worn into the reflexes.

The fork, cold now against your fingers where it rests on the counter, gives you dinner itself: a girlfriend's voice on the phone an hour ago, easy, a little tired, telling him she'd call after her shift, and him saying *yeah, no, eat without me* even though he was the one still standing here eating alone over the sink like a man who forgot there was a table twelve feet away. That's just how the evenings go some nights. Not lonely, exactly. Just his.

Your — his — chest carries something too, something you feel more than remember: a tightness behind the sternum some mornings that a doctor called blood pressure and told him to watch, salt, stress, the whole unglamorous list, and he'd nodded and gone back to work because thirty is too young to think about that seriously, except some nights, standing exactly like this, he feels his own pulse in his ears and thinks about it anyway.

You feel all thirty years of him settle into the stool, the muscle laid thick over a frame that runs heavy without running soft, the particular tiredness of a body that works for its living. Cigars sometimes, a beer twice a year at somebody's cookout, church only in the loose sense of a man who says a small thing to the dark before sleep and means it. None of it dramatic. All of it his, and none of it, until four seconds ago, anyone's business but his own.

You look down. The hand at the end of your arm is broad, brown, a burn-shine along two knuckles, empty of any ring, fingers already curling faintly like they want to find one to turn.

You lift your eyes to the black window like it's a lens, and you hear his voice come out of your mouth for the first time, low, almost amused at itself.

"...Okay," you say. "Who's driving."