Marlon Whitehorse

Corey Ashworth's phone is still warm in your hand, propped against a ring light nobody asked for, and the chat is scrolling past too fast to read, all heart emojis and somebody named xoxo_denise69 asking when you're going live for real. You have been him for less than a minute. Skinny fat, thirty-five, blue eyes that keep sliding to his own reflection in the black window behind the desk like he can't help it. His apartment smells like energy drink and carpet cleaner. There is a card taped to the monitor, a man in a Carhartt jacket holding a shovel, and you already know — from six spins ago, from the inside — whose face used to sit above that jacket, before this one. You bought Corey to see what streaming felt like from the audience side of thirty thousand strangers. It felt like nothing. It felt like standing in a room shouting into a jar. You are not bored, exactly. You are the specific kind of restless that only a full stomach produces. You open vessel.cards with his thumb, not yours, and you spin.

The rain hits you first, before the body does, before you even have eyes to blink it out of. Then weight — more of it than Corey ever carried, low and settled, a gut that has had thirty-four years to get comfortable. Hood shoved back. Water running down a face that is not tucking away from it, cheek up, mouth slightly open like he's tasting the sky. A canvas tote swings heavy against your — his — leg. Behind you the arrivals board still says 3 MIN in red, patient, unconcerned, while a man stops mid-decision to feel something he apparently hasn't felt in a long time.

The jacket is what opens first. Carhartt, brown, gone pale at the elbows where the canvas has worn thin from resting on truck doors and grave rails, a rip under one arm patched with iron-on tape that is already peeling at a corner — his own patch job, a Tuesday night with the TV on, needle borrowed from Priscilla's sewing kit because he didn't own one. Priscilla. The name comes with warmth and a specific kitchen — yellow light, a dog that isn't hers barking next door, her laugh when he showed her the finished patch like a kid with a school project. She's at work right now, some dental office front desk, and she is going to ask him tonight why he's soaked through when the bus shelter has a roof, and he won't have an answer, because he doesn't know either. He just wanted the rain on his face. He'd been standing under fluorescent light all afternoon at the cemetery — not this afternoon, an old one, layering back — packing red Houston clay under a green tarp over a hole he'd cut clean-edged that morning, and something about the size of the hole, the size of most of them, had sat wrong in his chest all day, though he couldn't have told you why, and he doesn't tell Priscilla things like that because there isn't a way to say it that doesn't sound like complaining about a job that pays the light bill.

The tote bag in his hand is heavier memory than it looks: a thermos, a paperback with a cracked spine, a folded flyer for a job he isn't going to take, gloves he forgot to leave at the yard. His hands know shovels the way some men's hands know steering wheels — the give of dirt versus clay, when to lean on the handle and when to throw the whole shoulder into it, thirty-four years old and a lower back that announces itself every morning before his alarm does. Nothing dramatic wrong with him. Just wear, evenly distributed, a body that has done the same motion ten thousand times and will do it ten thousand more.

Under the shirt — gray, ribbed, thin from washing — his chest remembers a woman who isn't Priscilla. Denise, gone four months now, who used to text him song lyrics for no reason and stopped, all at once, the way people do when they've already decided and are just waiting for you to notice. He noticed. He still checks, sometimes, whether she's read something he hasn't sent. He would never say this out loud to anyone, least of all to Priscilla, who deserves better than being the woman he settled into after the one he wanted.

The shoes remember standing all day at graveside services in clothes that were never quite formal enough, families who didn't look at him, which he'd decided a long time ago was fine, was even a kind of mercy — nobody wants to make eye contact with the man closing the ground over somebody's father.

And this morning — this exact jacket, off the hook by the door, the smell of yesterday's rain already in it before today's started, jeans pulled on standing because sitting on the bed wakes Priscilla, who works nights sometimes and was still asleep, a kiss on her shoulder he wasn't sure she felt, then out into a sky that was already deciding to open up.

You look down. His hands — wide, calloused across the palm in a bar exactly where a shovel handle sits, mole high on the cheek you can't see but can feel like a fixed point when you touch your own face, water still running off the ends of black hair gone flat and heavy with rain. Thirty-four years of a body that has never once been rich and has also never once, until this month, been alone. The bus board clicks over. 2 MIN.

You laugh, a short surprised sound in a voice that isn't Corey's, isn't yours, isn't anybody's you've been today until now.

"Guess I'm not catching that one."