Marcus Denby

The kitchen is Andre's, technically — the lease has his name on it, the crumbs on the counter are his crumbs — but it has been sixty seconds, and already the scar through his eyebrow is just a scar you're wearing, not a thing that happened to him and hurt. You look at his phone on the counter, screen still lit from where you set it down to check the site. Contractor's hands, callused in the wrong places for the life you're about to leave. Nothing wrong with him. That's the thing nobody warns you about — the good ones bore you faster, because there's no problem to solve, no ache to press on. You paid, you spun, you got a fine young man in Dallas with a whole life ahead of him and a scar you didn't earn, and by the second minute you are already thinking about the wheel like it's a door left open in another room. Number 139. You don't even tell yourself a reason. Your thumb is already moving.

The warehouse comes up out of the fluorescent hum first, the smell of cardboard dust and cold concrete, and then the body: shorter than the last one, denser through the shoulders, a scanner strapped to a forearm that isn't your forearm yet. His hand is in a bin of small boxes, fingers closed on one, and for half a second the motion just stops — the wrongness of a new hand not knowing yet where the fingers end. Then it moves again, slow, deliberate, like a man double-checking a step he's done ten thousand times without looking. Ten more after that, careful, each one landing soft in the tote, on a job that stopped needing this much attention years ago.

The vest comes first, orange and gray webbing gone dark with a day's sweat, and it brings a morning with it — this morning, a Monday, cold light through a triple-decker's kitchen window, coffee poured and half-forgotten because his daughter called before school and he stood there holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder while he pulled the vest over his head one-armed. She's four. She wanted to tell him about a bug she found. He remembers laughing, actually laughing, alone in that kitchen, before he had to hang up and lace his boots. The boots come next, steel-toed and broken in exactly to the shape of these feet, and there's a whole year in them — early buses, cold platforms, a shift that starts while the sky is still doing whatever it does in the deep dark instead of dawn, because this is a night crew and the Boston outside that bay door right now is deep afternoon pretending to be something else entirely for a body that has been up since before any of it made sense.

The polo against his back gives up an ex — Tasha, her name arriving with the fabric like it was folded into the collar. Not a bad ending, just an ordinary one, the kind that leaves two people still texting about a kid's dentist appointment and nothing else. There's an ache in that, small and worn smooth, the kind you carry without carrying, the kind that never comes up because there's no reason to bring it up, only to feel it when a shirt happens to touch a certain way.

The studs in both earlobes are cold under two fingers when the hand drifts up without being told to — old habit, a hand running over close-cropped sides and finding the pompadour instead, higher than it used to wear it, since — since a haircut he remembers getting on a whim, liking himself a little more in the mirror after. Small vanity. Church on the Sundays he makes it, a beer maybe twice a year at somebody's cookout, never a cigarette, not once, his mother's voice about that one still somewhere in him though she's been gone eight years now. Thirty-one and strong through the forearms from lifting cases all night, a low ache low in the back that flares by hour six and hasn't flared yet, this hand knowing exactly how to grip a box without looking, how to walk an aisle without a wasted step, none of it thought about, all of it simply true.

You look down. The hand is broader than the last one, a fine white scar-line missing from the eyebrow, a scanner strap warm from his own pulse instead of yours. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, and somewhere out past the racking a forklift beeps its long slow reverse note into the cold.

"There you are," you say, to no one who can hear it, and you don't look away from your own hand until the beeping stops.