Marcus Tillery

The ladder is still wet where your palm sits, and the smell of latex paint has been in your nose so long you stopped noticing it around spin forty. Dennis Aucoin's shoulder aches in the specific way that means tomorrow it will ache worse, and there is a fine gray dust of drywall in the creases of knuckles that are not, were never, yours. You have been him for less than a minute. That is the whole complaint. Less than a minute of fifty-six years, of a lower back that announces itself on every rung, of a client somewhere downstairs already unhappy about the color, and you know — the way you have known seventy-four times before — that you did not come back to the wheel to finish a wall. You came back because a body this tired has only one good feature, which is that it is easy to leave. You take the phone out of the paint-flecked pocket, you do not even open the site, muscle memory carries you there, and your thumb — Dennis's thumb, spotted, trembling slightly at rest — taps the spin before the ladder has stopped wobbling under a weight you are already done with.

The path is under a low bridge, concrete close overhead, and then it opens back into the gray-gold light of a canal at dawn and you are running.

Not walking into a run. Already inside one. Mid-stride, weight coming down on a left foot that is not the foot the stumble happened on a half-second ago — you feel the ghost of that missed step in the tendons before you feel anything else, a stutter the muscle remembers and the mind does not. Breath is going in and out of a chest that does this every morning, easily, well within itself, air a little sharp with cold and river-wet and cut grass. Earbuds feed a podcast voice you don't process yet. A watch on the left wrist buzzes once against the tattoo inked over the bone there — the buzz means a split time, mile four, a pace this arm has never actually produced, and something under the skin does not know how to file it. Sneakers, black and white, hit pavement with a rhythm laid down over years of exactly this. Your head is level. Your arms have dropped an inch without asking permission. The stride resumes like nothing tore.

The earbuds are the first thing that opens, because they are already in, warm from an ear that has worn them on this exact loop probably four hundred times — and what comes back is not a memory so much as a weather system: an apartment on the east side, blackout curtains because the stream runs past midnight and mornings are the only quiet he gets, a desk with three monitors and a ring light gone cold and dark now, waiting. The RGB strip behind it cycles colors nobody's watching. There's a chat window he can see behind his eyes, names scrolling, a donation sound that lives in his skull the way a jingle does. He streams fighting games mostly, some retro stuff for the nostalgia crowd, and there is a specific pride in it that isn't fame, isn't money exactly, it's being good at explaining why a combo works, at making four hundred strangers feel like they're in a room with somebody who likes them. He runs before all of that. Has to. Says on stream sometimes, half-joking, that the run is the only part of the day he doesn't perform.

The shirt — you don't have it yet, it's the shorts and the tee from this morning, but the tee at home, the black one with the Pac-Man print gone soft and cracked from washing, that one comes through sideways, a flash off nothing you're touching now but close enough to reach: pulling it over his head in the gray dark of the bedroom before the sun, headphones already slung around his neck out of habit even though he won't need them for hours, an easy motion, shirt then joggers he changes out of for these shorts, laughing once at a Discord message on the nightstand screen before he silences the phone and heads out. Small, ordinary, no weight to it except that it was this morning, which somehow makes it the heaviest thing in the whole body.

His legs are doing the actual work of memory better than any thought can. Twenty-three years in this frame and none of it wasted — you can feel training in the hips, in a stride that doesn't waste energy, five-eight and coiled tight, the kind of athletic that was built on purpose and kept up out of pride more than any doctor's order. Nothing hurts. That fact lands strange after Dennis, after fifty-six years of a body filing complaints before you'd even asked it to move. This one is quiet. Warm at the calves, a little tightness behind the left knee that's been there three weeks and isn't serious, breath even, heart steady around a number the watch is already logging under someone else's account.

The tattoos on the forearms carry their own small heat where the shirt's short sleeve brushes them — a dagger and roses on one arm, an eagle and an anchor on the other, bold outlines gone a little soft at the edges with time, the kind of ink a very young man picks because it looks permanent and means nothing except that he wanted something permanent. Getting the first one: nineteen, a shop off Broadway with a friend who chickened out at the door, the buzz of the needle a shock and then a rhythm he learned to like. Faith is somewhere under all of it too, quieter — Sunday mornings that used to be church with his mother, less often now, but the feeling of a hand on his shoulder in a pew still surfaces when nothing else is happening, unbidden, the way this whole life is arriving unbidden, sleeve by sleeve.

No one waiting on him. No ex who still has a hook in anything. A few beers at a friend's place every couple months, never anything stronger, never smoke, and that absence feels like clean air after Dennis's whole gray-lunged, thirty-year habit of paint fumes and cigarettes on the porch. Twenty-three is unbelievably light to carry. You'd forgotten what light felt like.

Your pace breaks. Two steps that never land as a fall, and then you're running again, same rhythm, different foot leading, the earbuds still murmuring their podcast into an ear that isn't listening to it anymore, if it ever really was.

You look down without stopping — can't stop, legs won't let you yet, they're still finishing what he started — and you watch this hand swing up into the gray dawn light, brown-skinned, tattooed, a little scraped once across one knuckle from something you'll never know the story of, because nobody handed you that, only the shape of the hand and the ink on it. You turn it over mid-stride like you're checking it for damage. It is not damaged. It is perfect and new and none of it is yours and all of it, for exactly as long as this lasts, is.

You laugh — his breath, your relief — and say to the empty towpath and the lightening water beside it, to no one, "Okay. Okay, that's different."

The watch buzzes again. You keep running because the legs want to, and somewhere behind you, gone all at once and without knowing it was ever there, is a house that still needs a second coat.