Mark Alvear

The tray under your borrowed hands is heavier than it should be, four glasses of house red for a four-top that's been complaining about the wait for twenty minutes, and you are so tired of being Desean Okafor that the tiredness has a taste, like flat soda. Not bad, as bodies go. Thirty-two, quick reflexes, a laugh that gets good tips. But the shift is a double, your feet — his feet — ache in a specific spot under the left arch that never heals because you never let it, and the manager keeps saying *table nine, table nine* like the name is a whip. Less than a minute you've worn him this time, but the wanting is already there underneath, old and simple: not this. Something else. Anything with air in it. You set the tray down mid-order, walk to the back hallway where your phone charges by the timeclock, and open the page with the wheel on it, and you do not think about Desean again.

—

The stumble isn't a fall. It's a foot finding pavement it didn't expect, a half-beat of wrongness in a rhythm that has run this exact canal path four hundred times, and then the other foot comes down and the stride just — continues. Cool air goes into lungs that are not panicked, because the body doesn't know anything happened. A watch buzzes against a wrist, flashing a split time for a mile marker no memory attaches to. Earbuds feed a podcast voice mid-sentence about supply chains. The light is that particular gray-gold of a Dallas dawn, low and wet-looking over the water, and you are standing in it, moving in it, taken whole into a stride already three miles deep.

—

The shirt is the first thing. Damp with a sweat that isn't cooling as fast as it should this early, technical fabric snug over a chest that carries muscle like a habit, not a project — *lift Tuesdays Thursdays, always has, since the divorce, since needing somewhere to put the hours* — and there it is, the first flash: a bathroom mirror, gray light, a man pulling this exact shirt over his head at 5:40 a.m., dimples showing even though nothing is funny, because his face just sits that way, always has, people comment on it in every meeting he's ever run. Mark. The name arrives with the shirt like it was stitched into the collar. Mark Alvear, forty, and the shirt sleeve against your arm gives you the drawer it came from, the fold of it, the girlfriend's voice from the other room — *Renee* — telling him not to forget the thing tonight, some work dinner disguised as a favor, and him saying *I won't, I love you* on the way out the door in a tone so unremarkable it could only be real.

The shorts next, the elastic waistband worn soft, and through it comes a whole year: the January he decided forty needed a body that could still do a 10K without apologizing for itself, the treadmill in the garage of the new-build, the smell of drywall dust that never quite leaves a house that young. The watch on the wrist — heavier memory, this one, deliberate — comes with two kids' faces at a soccer game, a custody weekend, the particular ache of loving them on a schedule instead of by instinct. And under that, quieter, a woman who isn't Renee: a name that surfaces and won't finish surfacing, an ex from before the subdivision, before the pickup in the driveway, a version of himself that took a different fork and still, some nights, wonders about the road not run. He has never told Renee her name comes up. He has never told anyone.

The shoes against the pavement give you the body plain: forty and holding, the knees a little more honest than they used to be about hills, hairline gone soft at both temples in the mirror this morning and him not minding it the way he thought he would, a callus on the second toe from ten years of the same brand of shoe, lungs that know this exact humidity and don't fight it. The lanyard he isn't wearing right now lives in a memory anyway — a hotel lobby, beige carpet, a client's handshake, the particular fatigue of being liked for a living. Sales is a kind of performance and he's good at it and it costs him something small every single day that he has stopped noticing costs him anything.

The earbud gives you a commute. The canal path gives you four hundred identical dawns, gray into gold, breath into steam, the one hour of the day that belongs to no one but him.

—

Your stride breaks again — deliberately, this time — and you stop on the path, chest working, and lift both hands up in front of your face like the answer is written on them. Calluses at the base of the fingers. A thin white scar-line of nothing, just old rope-burn from yard work, at the heel of the right palm. Not your hands. Never were.

You say it out loud, to the water, to the lit dock post, to nobody: "Whoever you were — thanks for the legs."

Somewhere behind you the watch buzzes again, logging a split for a man who isn't running anymore, and you don't know yet how long you'll let it sit unlogged, how long Mark Alvear gets to be the one thing you're wearing before the wanting turns over again.