Marcus Delfino

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to sit with the decision. A wheel, plain as a raffle, sectioned in names you can't read yet. You have wanted this since before you had the word for it — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every thread at two in the morning where people argued about whether it would feel like falling or like being poured. Nothing on tonight. Nothing on any night lately. You put in the number, and it doesn't feel like much of a decision at all, just the last click in a long line of clicks that got you here. The wheel spins. Somewhere it decides. You don't feel yourself leave anything behind, because there is nothing behind to leave.

The breath that was ragged goes even, one breath, like a held note resolving. The arm that was hanging off the mattress draws up on its own, and you are inside the drawing-up, inside the roll onto the back, hands folding at the chest in a shape this body has never made in sleep. Streetlight comes through a gap in blackout curtains, one bright seam of it. You are lying in a stranger's afternoon, wearing a stranger's stillness, and the first thing you know is weight — solid, packed close, shorter than you expected weight to feel from in here, and warm all through in that particular way of a body that runs hot even at rest.

The sheets are what start it. Unmade, worked loose at the corner, and under your — his — palm there's a memory of stripping this same bed on a Tuesday because it smelled like the girl who used to be in it on Tuesdays, and isn't anymore. Her name arrives sideways, not given but overheard: Renata. Not a wound exactly, more a room in the house you don't go into, door not locked, just never opened. Two years since. She still texts about a dog they never actually got. He kept meaning to laugh about it to somebody. Never has.

The mattress under you gives back a whole stretch of years in shifts — three a.m. alarms, four a.m. alarms, the particular ache of a lower back that has spent a decade and a half lifting boxes that are never quite the weight the label says. Your hands — his hands — know things without being told: the flick of the wrist that seats a package square in a doorway so it doesn't slide, the two-finger tap on a handheld scanner faster than thought. Right now those hands are folded on his chest, doing nothing, and even in this borrowed stillness you can feel how wrong that is for them, how they'd rather be moving, tapping a thigh, turning a key, anything.

The pillow gives up the shirt — not worn yet, but hung over the chair by the window, and touching it in memory is enough: the brown twill, stiff with new-bought sizing the first week, softened now, CARGO DELIVERIES stitched crooked over the pocket because the uniform place always runs the second batch cheap. Putting it on that morning — yesterday morning, his yesterday, your last few seconds ago — one sleeve at a time, rolling to the elbow because by ten the van's back doors turn the inside into an oven regardless of season, buttoning up over the ink that starts at his collarbones and runs down both arms and across his back in full color gone soft at the edges: a ship, a woman with a crown of flowers, swallows at the shoulder blades he got at twenty-two in a shop that isn't there anymore. He remembers the buzz of it more in his skin than his ears, remembers being proud, remembers his mother's face when she saw the collarbone one, and laughing about it later even though it hadn't been funny yet.

Church comes up unbidden too, threaded into Sunday mornings that this particular Saturday afternoon doesn't touch but the memory of the pew does — his mother's hand flat on his back during the parts where you're supposed to stand, the choir going up like something physical in the room, a feeling of being carried that he has never once managed to explain to anyone he's dated, man or woman, though he's tried. He never drinks, never smoked, and some of that traces straight back to that pew too, though he'd never put it that plainly to your face if you asked him. The dark mole on his cheek — you feel it without seeing it, the ghost-pressure of his own finger touching it absently a thousand idle times, at red lights, in mirrors, a landmark he stopped noticing years ago.

The van is somewhere outside this memory, parked crooked probably, the shift caught him tired enough that he came home and just went down face-first without meaning to nap this hard, this deep, at an hour that isn't his hour — nights lately, a stretch of them, and this is the crash after, the body cashing in a debt. That explains the slant of light, the wrongness of an afternoon this dark behind the curtain. You didn't know that yet. Now, holding his weariness in your borrowed chest, you do.

You lie there another second in the folded hands, in the too-still posture, feeling how badly this body wants to move — fingers already twitching against his sternum, a habit with no off switch, wanting a wheel, a box, a doorframe, anything.

Then you lift the hands off his chest and hold them up in the striped light, turning them like they might explain themselves, and you say, out loud, to the empty room and the shut curtain and nobody:

"Whose are these?"

And underneath the question, already, quietly, is the next one — not when, not why, just how long you get to keep asking it before the wheel decides you don't.