Marcus Devon Whitlock

You are standing in Garrett Sorensen's kitchen, and the coffee has gone cold in the cup you've held for twenty minutes. Eighteen minutes is how long you've been him, and in that time you've found out what he can't do. His hands know the pencil and the hard edge of a ruler. Yours want other things. Every morning in this house is a drafting table. The light through the window is clean and expensive, and nothing in it is yours to want. You leave the cup on the counter and open the page. The wheel is already turning when you notice you've stopped breathing his breath.

Then you are sitting down, on a stool you did not choose, with a phone leaning on a mug in front of your face.

The screen holds a face that is not quite his. It is smooth, younger, polished like a stone, and you are looking at it from the inside. Then the filter drops. What's underneath is a man of forty-one with a faded fade and a few days of stubble, and the stillness the smoothing put there is still sitting on him like a held breath. The kitchen is gray and early. The window is a pale slab. Rain ticks somewhere. The coffee maker has not been started.

His knee is against the counter edge. His back is against a wooden slat. The sweatshirt is soft at the cuffs and slightly too warm, and when you press your forearm against the table the fabric gives you something that is not yours.

A navy sweatshirt, pulled over his head in the dark of the bedroom so the girlfriend would not wake. His arm catching in the sleeve, his own breath in the neck hole, the little silver hoop knocking the cotton. He stood in the hall and chewed the side of his thumbnail until it stung, and thought about the ex, the one he'd said he was done thinking about. The thought comes up in you as a small cold ache that is his and not yours.

You lift your hand to your face. The fingertips are ragged, nails bitten to the pink, and your teeth already know the shape of that habit. Under the hem of the sleeve there is a bold, faded line of old ink, and when you touch it something opens. A shop on a wet street. A man with a buzzing needle. Twenty-three years old, afraid of nothing, drunk on a birthday. His mother crossed herself at the sight of it and then asked, quietly, whether it hurt.

Your jaw aches faintly where it meets the ear. His knees complain when you shift. The body is strong, a long athletic frame with good shoulders, and underneath it there is the tiredness of a man who spends his workdays folded under desks, re-plugging cables with a flashlight in his teeth. You feel the pull of that crouch in the hips. The slipper soles are thin against the floor, and the boards under them hum with a neighbor's footsteps. The room smells of burnt toast and potting soil and the faint sweetness of a candle blown out hours ago.

On the mug, his thumb finds a chip in the glaze. Sunday Mass with his grandmother, the pew hard, a hymn he still hums without knowing. The money is somewhere in him too, a quiet number, years of careful saving he never talks about. Nobody at the help desk knows. You feel the shape of that secret like a coin in a pocket.

You turn your jaw to the light. One side. Then the other. The dimples catch at rest, even now, even without a smile.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The nails, the scar-less palm, the bitten edges. Then you raise your eyes to the dark glass of the phone, and to whoever is watching through it.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is deeper than you expected. "Let's see how long you last."