Marcus Odom

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films where the mirror shows a stranger, the threads at two in the morning, the stories about waking up in someone else. Tonight is a Tuesday with nothing in it. You have scrolled until the scrolling stopped meaning anything, and then there is a page with a wheel on it, and a price, and you do not believe it. You pay anyway. You spin.

Then you are sitting down.

A chair, thin cushion, metal tube pressing the back of your thighs. Morning light, white and flat, from a window on your right. Your chin is in your hand. The laptop shows a woman's face stopped mid-blink, eyes half shut, and in the corner a small square with a bearded man in it who is you. The timer keeps counting. There is no travel and no warning. You sit up dead centre into the camera and say hello, and the voice is lower than you expected, testing its own volume.

Nobody answers. She is frozen.

Your thumb is at your mouth. The nail is already short, and the edge of it is ragged against your lip. That is the first thing he gives you. A night in a church basement with folding chairs, his knee bouncing, his teeth working at the nail while a man prayed over the offering. His mother's voice in his head said *stop that*, and he could not.

The hoodie cuff under your fingers is soft and worn. Under it comes a morning, sleeve by sleeve: the zipper dragged up in the dark apartment so the roommate would sleep, the left arm in first because the right shoulder complains, the gray shirt from the floor, smelled and judged fine. Jeans from the chair back, stiff at the knee. Sneakers with the heels crushed from being stepped into without hands. He is twenty. He was careful with every dollar of this outfit.

Your palm rests on the table's cold chrome edge, and a rent number comes with it, the dread of the first of the month, a jar of coins. A job application is somewhere under the papers. A green mug is warm against your knuckle, and with it comes her, the ex, the recent one. Her laugh on a bench under dry palms, the way he said *I'll pray on it* and she heard *no*. The ache is real, low in the chest, and it is not yours.

The dreadlocks brush your neck. The bleach stings faintly at the scalp, the roots dark and new. The beard is thick under your knuckles. Your back is stiff from sitting hunched, your legs long and strong, a young body that expects to be fed and slept. He never drinks and never touched a cigarette. His hands know how to type fast, hold a pen, fold into prayer. They are rough at the fingertips, bitten.

You lift both hands off the keyboard and turn them over. Palms paler than the backs. Calluses, a torn cuticle, nails chewed to nothing. You look up into the lens, the frozen woman small beside your face.

"Okay," you say, and it comes out of him gently. "Hi."

The timer keeps counting. You do not know how long this one lasts, an hour or a year, or when the wanting comes back.