Marcus Whitfield

You are Ramón Ovalle for the seven-hundred-and-first time — no, the nine-hundred-and-second, though the count blurs now, and you are already tired of the lazy eye pulling your vision half a beat off true, tired of the store manager's key ring digging into a hip that has gone soft in a way you did not choose. You stand in his kitchen in Small-town Ohio at nearly midnight on a Thursday and you think about the blond car wash attendant in Eastern Kentucky, the one you wore before this, only seven minutes ago by the clock that matters, and how his knees didn't ache like this, how his hands smelled like tire shine and Armor All instead of whatever Ramón spilled on himself hours ago that you can't place. You left him because the wheel doesn't let you stay curious about only one man at a time — because somewhere in you there is still an itch shaped like unfinished business, a rival you've now stood inside and also stood against, and you want to see the other side of that coin again, the one who never knew he had a rival at all. So you thumb the site open on Ramón's cracked phone screen, the login already saved, and you do not think about what this does to him, because there is no Ramón left to do anything to. You spin.

The kitchen changes before your eyes do. Dark cabinets swim into wood-grain ones, cold Ohio linoleum becomes warmer tile underfoot, and you are shorter, thicker through the chest, weight settling low and dense into a body that carries itself close to the ground. A phone is inches from your face, screen lit on a watch that costs more than a month of somebody's rent, and your thumb — his thumb — is already lifting off the glass like it burned. The screen goes dark against the counter as you set it face-down, and the hand that placed it there simply stops, hovering, not reaching back.

The shirt is what opens him first — black cotton, worn soft, and under it your chest is deep and your shoulders wide in a way Ramón's never were. A flash: this morning, or some morning very like it, pulling this same shirt over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, his wife already gone to her shift, the closet door swinging on the hinge that always needed oil. He'd stood in front of the mirror a second longer than he needed to, not vain, just checking the beard was even, running two fingers down through it past his collarbone the way he'd done every day since it grew past choosing. The waves on top — he'd brushed them that morning too, slow circular strokes with the boar-bristle brush that lived in the bathroom drawer, a ritual older than the marriage, older than the job.

The sweatpants against your legs bring the couch, an evening two years back, his wife laughing at something on the television with her feet in his lap, and how content that had felt, how ordinary and whole, before the bills started arriving in envelopes that felt heavier than paper should. The kitchen smell — dish soap, a little bit of last night's rice — brings the knives on the magnet strip behind you, a wedding gift, and brings his hands, which know knives, which know a camera strap's weight across the neck, which know how to steady a clipboard against a hip while writing hail-dent measurements in a stranger's driveway under a flat gray sky. Insurance adjusting: a job he fell into, not one he loves, full of homeowners who look at him like he's the enemy before he's said a word, but he is good at it, methodical, patient, and the checks clear.

There is more — an ex-girlfriend's name surfacing unbidden, a warmth gone slightly sour with time, a version of himself from six years ago who almost didn't marry anyone at all. There is the tattoo on his arm under the short sleeve, cross and praying hands, pressed into his skin the week his grandmother died, and the ring on the left hand, plain gold, put on in a church that smelled like candle wax and floor polish, his mother crying in the second row. There is the phone screen, dark now, still holding the ghost of a watch he will never own, and the particular shame of wanting something priced past the version of his life he actually has.

You feel all five foot three of him, solid, wide, strong through the back from years of crouching beside cars, a low center of gravity that has never once made him feel small. Nothing hurts. Everything is dense and sure and his.

You look down at the hand that set the phone down, turn it over once in the low kitchen light, and it is a stranger's hand wearing a stranger's ring, and you lift your eyes to find nothing in the dark window but your own reflection looking back.

"Didn't think it'd be you again so soon," you say to no one, to the glass, to the wheel that isn't listening — and you don't know yet if that means tonight, or years from now, or if it's already too late to mean anything at all.