Marcus Enriquez

You are Wyatt Stroshane for the four hundred and eighth second of your life, and you already hate the smell of him — cattle feed and old sweat baked into a body that isn't yours, standing in a dark barn doorway at an hour before Honolulu has decided to wake up. Your hands, his hands, are thick and scarred at the knuckle, and they are already reaching for the phone before your mind catches up to wanting it. Four minutes was long enough to learn that this one aches in the lower back from lifting things too early, that the muscle means nothing if the joints are already going. You didn't spin for a farmhand. You never do. You spin because the wheel is a door that never locks, and the second one closes behind you the next one is already swinging, and you are the kind of person — if there is still a kind, if there still a person — who has never once let a door stay shut just because it's a good enough room. Boredom isn't even the word. It's more like an itch that lives one spin ahead of you always. Thumb on the screen. Payment already gone through, hardly even a choice by now. The wheel spins.

Sunlight instead of pre-dawn dark. That's the first thing — light on the good side of your face, warm and thick and coming through a window with old paint chipping off its frame. You are sitting. You are mid-word, mouth open on the shape of a greeting, and the weight in the chair is different — taller, leaner, younger, no ache riding the spine. A laptop in front of you shows a woman's face frozen mid-blink, her eyes closed in a way that will look, in a second, like she is praying rather than lagging, and beside her a small window holds your own face already talking, already three words into "hello" before you arrived to say it. Your voice comes out testing itself, too loud in the small kitchen, then quieter, finding its level the way a man does when he's just picked up an instrument he half-remembers playing.

The flannel shirt is soft, worn a hundred washes past new, and just touching the cuff of it drops you into a Tuesday — Marcus at a dryer, alone, folding it warm, some evangelical radio program murmuring from a phone propped against the detergent bottle, his mother's voice from years back telling him softness in the collar means it's a shirt worth keeping. The jeans against your legs remember a store in Katy, remember him choosing them because they were on sale and because his last pair had gone thin at the knee from kneeling to restock bottom shelves. Under the table your feet are in the same shoes from the vest photo, and the shoes know the linoleum of a checkout lane better than they know this kitchen floor — a decade, no, less, five years of an aisle-eight tile pattern worn into muscle memory, standing, standing, the particular tiredness that lives only in feet that don't get to sit.

The mug at your fingers is lukewarm, and lifting it brings back this morning whole: waking without an alarm because his shift doesn't start until two, showering slow because there was nowhere to be, standing in front of the mirror and thinking, not for the first time, about the birthmark down the side of his neck, wine-dark, the thing customers' eyes always slid to and away from too fast, the thing that made this dating app someone at the store had needled him into trying — a coworker sliding a phone across the breakroom table, saying just talk to somebody, man, what's it gonna cost you. And this is that: a woman two states over, matched last night, agreeing to a call because texting had gone well enough that both of them got brave. He was nervous getting the laptop set up. He'd worn the flannel because it was the nicest thing that didn't look like he'd tried.

The rest comes in through his hands themselves, without needing to touch anything new — twenty-six years of a body that has never been hit hard enough to scar, calluses only where the scanner gun sits day after day, a low simmering church-boy guilt about desires he's never acted badly on, a string of almost-girlfriends who liked him fine and drifted, a savings account he checks more than anyone would guess, careful, Baptist-taught, quietly proud of the number sitting there. No brothers he's close to. No one waiting on him tonight. A ring — his grandfather's, plain gold, worn on the right hand because it never fit the left — turning between two fingers right now without him having told them to, an old tic from testimony meetings as a teenager, fidgeting through the parts that made him feel watched by more than the room.

You look down and the hand is turning the ring, on its own, the way his hands have always done it, and for a second that alone undoes you more than the birthmark or the mustache or any of it — a gesture that isn't yours, running anyway, like the body kept a habit going after the tenant changed. You lift your eyes to the laptop's camera, to the frozen woman waiting on the other end of a Tuesday morning she doesn't know just changed hands, and Marcus's mouth, your mouth now, says the only thing that feels true to say into a face that hasn't blinked yet:

"Sorry — I think I just froze up too."

Nobody answers. Somewhere in Honolulu it is still early enough to have never woken up, and here it is the middle of an ordinary Thursday morning, and neither one of you knows yet how long you get to keep him.