Marcos Ibarra

Reynaldo's hands are asleep at his sides, this early, and they are your hands for a few more seconds. You are standing in his kitchen in the dark, not turning on the light, because you already know where everything is — the fridge hum, the linoleum cold coming up through his socks, the smell of yesterday's coffee still in the pot. You spun once already tonight and it put you here, into a 51-year-old miner with a green kettle-belly and eyes the color of pond scum, and it was fine, it was a body, it worked. But twenty minutes into being Reynaldo you went looking in his phone for something to do with his hands not knowing what to do with themselves, and you found the texts. You found what Reynaldo thinks about Marcos Ibarra, the guy two lockers down at the mine office, the guy who covered a shift for him once and never let him forget it, the guy who — Reynaldo's memory supplies this ungently — makes more, dates someone younger, still has his hair. Twenty-eight minutes was long enough to get curious and short enough to still have the itch. You are not spinning again to become Reynaldo something else. You are spinning to go be the other guy, from the inside, just to see.

You pay. You spin. The wheel does not care what you want, only that you want.

And you are running.

Not walking into it — running, already mid-stride, cold air punching down into a chest that is not soft the way Reynaldo's was, that has muscle laid close over the ribs, and your foot that was about to land does not land where it meant to, some nerve in the ankle forgetting itself for half a beat, a stumble that never finishes stumbling, and then the other foot is down and you are running again, arms lower now, someone else's rhythm taking over your own like a second driver grabbing a wheel already in motion. A watch on your wrist buzzes a number for a mile you never ran. Cold air. A creek running brown somewhere off to your left through bare trees, the gray nothing-yet of a Kentucky dawn. Earbuds feeding you a voice mid-sentence about nothing you were listening to.

The shirt is not there yet — this is a long-sleeve top, damp already down the spine, clinging — and it gives you nothing, too new, too wet with a run that isn't yours. But the shoes. The shoes have ten thousand miles in them and they come up through your feet like a held note: Marcos, thirty-one years old in this memory, lacing these same brand new out of the box in a garage that smelled like cut grass and gear oil, his daughter's bike upside down in the corner missing a chain, his wife's voice — no. Ex. Girlfriend now. Priya, and the memory folds sideways into her kitchen, into a Tuesday, into her laughing at something he said that stuttered coming out, the words catching on themselves the way they always do when he's nervous or excited or both, and she waited, she always just waited, unbothered, and something in his chest unclenched every time she did that.

The watch on his wrist gives you the mile-four ping and underneath it a decade of them, every early morning before a shift, before the booth, before the two kids were old enough to not need him standing in the hallway at 6 a.m. making sure they were up. The booth. That comes in through nothing you're touching now but arrives anyway, riding shotgun on the running rhythm his legs already know without him: the reel canisters, cool and heavy, REEL 2 16MM stenciled in a hand not his, the projector's take-up arm ticking, the beam going out through the port window into a dark room full of strangers who never once thought about the man behind them threading it. Diagnosed with ADHD at thirty-eight and it explained the booth to him retroactively — why the dark, ticking, single-task room had always been the only twenty minutes of his day his head went quiet.

And Reynaldo. There he is, small, from this side of it: a guy at the mine office who covers a shift and holds it over you for a year, who you have never once said a real word to, who does not know your name is attached to two kids and a woman who waits for your stutter to finish and a job that puts you in the one dark room in the county where nobody's watching your face. You feel, distantly, the small mean pleasure Reynaldo felt learning your girlfriend was younger than his ex-wife. You feel how little of your actual life he ever bothered to learn. It is almost funny, standing in the body of the man you envied, discovering the envy was aimed at nothing anyone had checked.

Your feet keep running you because that's what they know to do, the cable footbridge coming up gray and swaying faintly ahead over the brown water, and you let them.

Then you stop, chest working, a real ache low in a 44-year-old's knees that Reynaldo never had to carry, and you hold your hands up in front of your face — pale islands scattered across the backs of them, up the forearms, a map with no coastline — and you turn them over slow, like they might explain themselves.

"Two shifts," you say out loud, to no one, breath fogging, "and I still don't feel like I won anything."