Marcus Feldbaum

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to feel the weight of it — a wheel rendered in flat gray, a price box, a button that says SPIN. You have read the threads for years. You have watched the films twice each, the ones where someone wakes up behind a different face, and felt the specific ache of wanting a thing that isn't real. Sunday evening, nothing on, the kind of dull that makes a stupid idea feel reasonable. You pay. You do not expect it to do anything. You press the button anyway, the way you'd flick a lighter you didn't think had fluid left.

There is no falling, no tunnel, none of the things you imagined. There is just weight, all at once — a body heavier than nothing, a shoulder against a mattress, a phone six inches from a face that is now, somehow, the only face there is. Your thumb — his thumb — is already moving on the screen, faster now, steadier, flicking past a car ad he'd stopped on three seconds ago in a life you weren't in. The room is dark except for the blue rectangle. Somewhere outside the window it is morning. Nobody has told the lamp or the blinds that.

The shirt comes first — not new information, just already there, soft jersey worn thin at the collar, and with it a hand passing it over, days ago, pulling it from a drawer because the first shirt had deodorant on the cuff. Small thing. It comes with a laugh — his — at himself, at seven in the morning, re-dressing in a dark bedroom so he wouldn't wake her. Sunday. He doesn't work Sundays. He works nights sometimes, covers for people, and this is one of those weeks where his Sunday starts at four in the morning because the warehouse schedule doesn't care what day a calendar says it is. He had come home, showered, lain down next to her with his phone because his body was too wired from the overnight to sleep yet. That part arrives whole, unasked — the hum of the forklift charger room, the fluorescent hallway outside his glass-walled office, a text he sent his assistant manager at 5:50 a.m. that just said handle it, back Tuesday.

The ring is next. Left hand, plain band, and touching it — you're not touching it, it's just there, warm with his blood — gives you a wedding, four years gone, her in cream because she said white felt like a costume, his mother crying under the chuppah in a way that embarrassed him and that he still thinks about fondly. Her name arrives sideways, in the feeling of an argument they had Thursday about tile samples and whether they could afford the good ones. They can. He just likes pretending they can't. It's a kind of flirting, for them.

The mattress under him. Fourteen years of a bad lower back that isn't bad, exactly, just present — the dull ten-minutes-after-standing ache that comes from a body that sits at a desk half the day and stands on concrete the other half. Strong forearms, nothing dramatic, built from moving pallets nobody else wanted to move because he'd rather do it than write someone up for not doing it. A goatee he's kept the same shape for a decade, trims it Sunday nights usually, except this Sunday started at four a.m. so maybe tonight instead. Cuticles picked raw on the right thumb, a habit from meetings, from waiting on numbers that aren't his fault but will be his problem. He quit smoking six years ago on a bet with his brother-in-law and still, some nights, misses the fifteen minutes alone it used to buy him.

None of it is yours. All of it sits in you anyway, borrowed and warm, a whole Sunday morning and a whole marriage arriving through a phone, a ring, a shirt, a mattress — four small doors, each one opening onto a year.

The thumb stops. You stop it. You bring the hand up in front of the face, his face, and turn it over slowly under the lamp light bleeding in from the hallway, like it might still belong to somebody who's about to walk in and ask for it back.

You look up, into the dark bedroom, toward where a mirror would be if there were one.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one. "Okay."