Marcus Ellison

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Three minutes in this collar and already you know it's wrong. Father Speck's knees ache from a genuflection you didn't choose, his sinuses clogged with incense that isn't yours, and somewhere behind his blue eyes there's a boy he can't stop thinking about, a confession he heard yesterday that he doesn't have the stomach to carry. You didn't spin the wheel to become a man who carries things. You spun it to stop being anyone in particular. This body came with a conscience bolted on, and it itches like a wool sweater in July. Sunday light through a chapel window, dust turning slow in it, and you think: not this. Not a man who kneels. You get up from the pew where he'd have prayed, walk to the little rectory office with its ancient desktop, and pull up the page you already have bookmarked in a browser history that isn't yours but is now. vessel.cards. The wheel. You put in the card number you memorized before you were even Speck. You spin.

The rhythm breaks.

Your hand — his hand — stutters on the keyboard, one keystroke landing on the wrong number, and the correction comes automatic, unhurried, a habit older than thought. You are sitting. Fluorescent light is flattening everything to the same gray-white, and there are two monitors in front of you throwing columns of figures nobody in the world will ever read twice. A mug of coffee gone cold at your elbow. Your leg is bouncing under the desk, has been bouncing this whole time, and you didn't start it — it simply hasn't stopped. Diabetes has your mouth dry in a specific, familiar way you don't have a name for yet. The chair creaks. You breathe, and the breath goes down into a chest that is wider than the one you left, muscle under a cardigan, and you type the next figure. Then the one after that. Ten keystrokes, each one checked twice, on a spreadsheet this body has built ten thousand times without looking.

The wedding band is the first thing that speaks. It's tight on your ring finger — his finger — worn smooth on the inside from years of turning, and it comes with a hand reaching for it in a hotel bathroom mirror eleven years ago, a woman's voice through the door asking if he was almost ready, and the feeling underneath is so plain and unfussy it nearly knocks you sideways: *he loved her before he understood what that word cost.* Her name arrives a half-second later — Danielle — with a whole Tuesday attached to it, her laughing at something small he said over dishes, nothing that would make a story, everything that makes a marriage.

The cardigan against your back gives you the closet: gray wool, chosen because it hides sweat and looks like a man who has his life together, pulled on this morning — his morning, hours behind wherever you're standing now — over the gingham shirt, cuffs rolled twice because that's how he's worn cuffs since grad school. Sleeve by sleeve the memory dresses you: standing at the mirror in the apartment with the courtyard and the dry palms outside, checking his blood sugar first, the little prick and the small flare of resentment at his own body that he never says out loud, then the shirt, then this cardigan, then glasses that aren't on his face right now because he doesn't need them for the monitor's font size at this zoom. Two kids' voices somewhere down the hall this morning, cartoons too loud, Danielle telling them to let Daddy work today, it's Sunday, he's got a deadline. He kissed her on the crown of the head — she was still sitting, drinking her coffee — before he left for the office he keeps ten minutes' walk from home so weekends don't feel like weekends lost. He does this because the numbers are cleaner without noise, and because the small silence of a Sunday office when the account is nearly done is its own kind of relief he never explains to anyone.

The desk gives you the job: eleven years at the firm, the promotion he wanted that went to someone louder, the quiet decision after that to stop wanting it and just be good, be reliable, be the man whose columns always balance. His body remembers hunching over these keys until his lower back learned the shape of this chair. It remembers standing up at 3pm to walk it off because sitting too long spikes his numbers, remembers the little kit in the desk drawer, test strips, the discipline nobody sees. The thinning place at the crown of his head where his hand goes sometimes without his permission, checking it, an old vanity he's mostly made peace with. The gold tooth flashes in the monitor's dim reflection when something like a private smile crosses his mouth, and you feel the specific shape of it in his jaw — he got it at twenty-two on a bet with his brother, kept it because Danielle told him it suited him, told him so on their third date and he never let it go after that.

He quit drinking six years ago, quietly, no meeting, no story, just stopped one Tuesday and never started again, and the body still remembers the absence of it as a kind of held breath, decided and boring and his.

Your leg is still bouncing. It has never once stopped, not through any of that.

You look down at the hand on the mouse. Broad, dark-knuckled, the band catching the fluorescent light, a life's worth of small tremors of love sitting in it that aren't yours and are now the only ones you have. You turn it over. There's a version of you three minutes old in a body that knelt in Kentucky, and a version older than that scattered across thirty-eight other men, and none of it weighs anything against what's sitting in this hand right now — a Tuesday, a mirror, a boy who kept a gold tooth for a woman who liked it.

You lift your eyes to whatever's in front of you — the monitor, the window, the courtyard light coming low and late through the blinds — and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Let's finish this one."