Marcus Teodoro Whitaker

You have read the threads at two in the morning for years. Mid-morning now, a Saturday, nothing on, and you have been scrolling until the screen stopped meaning anything. Then the page with the wheel on it. You did not believe it. You paid anyway, because you have always wanted this, in films, in stories, in the long quiet hours of imagining, and it has never once been for sale. You spin. The wheel slows. It stops.

Dark. A mattress takes your whole front, and a cheek is pressed into cotton that smells of someone else's sleep. His breath is ragged, and in one breath it goes even. The arm hanging off the bed draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back, and the hands fold at the chest. You did that. He has never once slept like this. Streetlight lies in a thin white stripe through the curtains.

Your chest is heavy. Everything is heavy in a warm, settled way, the belly rising under the T-shirt, the weight of a man who has stopped fighting it. Your tongue finds a gap in your teeth where a toothpick would sit.

The T-shirt is soft from a thousand washes, and the cotton against your back gives you the first flash. It is his, not yours. A Sunday, a wife laughing in a kitchen, the shirt pulled over his head, the pleasure of its loose fit now that he no longer fights his own size. Then the sleeves, one arm and then the other, the way he always shoves the left through first.

Your right thumb finds the band on your left hand and turns it. The memory comes up whole. A courthouse in the rain, years ago, her hands cold in his, the metal still new and stiff. Two kids later it has worn smooth, and he has spun it on nights he could not sleep. He is afraid of money running out even though there is money, and the job listings on the laptop downstairs have been shaming him for weeks. Under that is the quiet fact of the cigarettes he gave up, and the toothpick that took their place. The wanting for a cigarette is still in the muscles of his hands, and now it is in yours.

The sheet under your palm is rough where it has worn thin. The floor creaks somewhere below. Down the hall a child turns over in sleep, and you know which child by the sound. Your knees ache the way a forty-four-year-old's do, and your lower back is a dull, tight fist. Your neck is warm along the jaw where the birthmark runs, and you do not need a mirror to know it. His hand has touched it ten thousand times, an old habit, and now your fingers go there.

You lift your hands into the stripe of light. They are broad, the knuckles thick, the ring bright. You turn them over slowly, palms and then backs. Then you look up, into the dark, into whatever is looking back.

"Hello," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Look at us."

Nothing answers. Somewhere a siren goes by, and it could be four minutes or four years, and the wheel is already waiting.