Marcus Beaumont

The site loads slow on a Monday that isn't going anywhere. You have had this thing in you since you were young enough to still call it a game — the wanting to be someone, anyone, else, just for the length of a held breath. Every movie about it, every story you read twice, every thread you fell into at two in the morning telling yourself it was curiosity. It never had a price before. Now there's a wheel on a page called vessel.cards and a button that says spin and your thumb is already moving before the rest of you agrees to it. You pay. The wheel turns. It does not ask what you want. It just gives you a man.

The room arrives before you do — yellow tile, a bulb buzzing white along a mirror gone soft at the edges, a tap running warm over a stopped drain. There is a toothbrush in your mouth, foam gone thin on your lip, and the stroke you were mid-way through finishes on its own, on the wrong side, slower than it started, like the hand had to remember what it was doing partway through doing it. You rinse. You rinse again. You stand the brush up bristle-first in water that has clearly been grey for years, out of habit that isn't yours yet, and the tap keeps running because nobody has told this hand to shut it off.

The flannel is what opens first — worn soft at the elbows, a snap missing at the cuff you've apparently never fixed — and through it comes a garage, early, cold enough to see breath, pulling this same shirt off a hook by the door on a morning that smelled like coffee going cold in the truck. Sweatpants next, and a whole stretch of afternoons on a couch that was never quite big enough for this body, a game on low, a cigar going untouched in an ashtray because you don't smoke inside, you never smoke inside, some rule from some year you can't place. The socks — wool, thick, a Christmas-gift kind of practical — bring back a woman's hands, someone folding laundry that wasn't hers to fold, someone who left three winters ago and whose name arrives with a small, clean ache that isn't yours but sits in your chest like it might be now. Diane. The one who got away, everyone always says, like it's a phrase you can hand somebody instead of the actual years.

The sink under your palm gives you more sinks — a hundred mornings in this exact bathroom, a kid's height marked in pencil on the door frame down the hall, a boy who visits every other weekend and calls this apartment the small place without meaning anything cruel by it. The tile under your bare feet is cold in a way that says winter is close. Your own knees complain when you shift your weight — cartilage worn down from twenty years of pitched roofs, forty-six years old and every one of them logged somewhere in the joints. Your right arm carries its own memory separate from the rest — an eagle, a dagger, a banner half-faded green, inked over three sittings in your twenties in a shop that isn't there anymore, pain you chose and liked choosing. Your leg is already bouncing against the tub's edge, has been the whole time, a motor that runs whether you're thinking about it or not. Somewhere behind your ribs a doctor's voice says machine, every night, you're not getting real sleep, and you nodded and never bought the machine.

It is the middle of the day and you are standing in pajama pants with a toothbrush, and some other year — a work van, a rack of shingles, a town spread out below a ladder — is trying to surface and can't quite find its footing, because today, whatever today is, you are not on a roof. You're just a man in his own bathroom in the wrong hour, brushing his teeth like there's nowhere to be, which — you understand, distantly, the way you understand things that are his and not yours yet — there isn't. Not today.

You look down. The hand on the faucet is not thin, not young, has calluses along the base of each finger that don't come from a toothbrush. You turn it over slow, like you're checking it's attached right, and the dimples show in the mirror even though the face isn't doing anything you'd call a smile.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, to the running water. "Okay."