Marquis Delahoussaye

Ernesto's knees are the reason. Sixty-four years of longshoreman weather living in the joints, and you've had them less than a minute and already they ache going down the porch step, already you understand why he sits so much, why he complains about barometric pressure to a dead phone. His dimples fold into a face full of pain when he lowers himself into the porch chair. Gray hair catches the light off a stranger's yard. You paid for this body eighteen spins ago in another skin entirely, and it was good — a strong back, an easy laugh, dimples people trusted — but a body is a rental car and this one has forty thousand miles of hip complaint on it, and you are bored of driving carefully. You take the phone out of his shirt pocket, the one that isn't yours either, and you open vessel.cards, and Ernesto's thick fingers, not yours, still not yours after everything, tap the wheel.

It stops on a mugshot-plain portrait: a young man, dreadlocks past his ears, a scar through one eyebrow like a chalk line somebody drew and never erased.

You are on your back with your hands folded on your chest like a man laid out for viewing, and that is the first wrong thing, because you have never once slept that way, and you will never know that, because it is already how you're breathing when you arrive — even, unbothered, like nothing happened, because as far as this body is concerned nothing did. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains in one clean blade across the ceiling. Your — his — arm, which had been hanging off the mattress, is already at your chest, and you can feel that it took no effort, like it was always going there. Twenty-four years old, and you can feel it immediately in a way you couldn't in Ernesto — nothing announces itself yet, no ache checking in before you've asked it to.

You don't move for a second. That's not you being careful. That's the body's own habit — a heavy sleeper, slow to surface — and you're wearing the habit before you're wearing the thought.

Then his life starts arriving the way it always does, sideways, through what you're touching, and you're touching almost nothing — a top sheet, a mattress, the cheap comfort of a comforter kicked to his knees — so what comes first is small: the smell of the room, latex paint gone stale in the closet where a five-gallon bucket sits with a crusted lid, and under it, cigarette-sweet vape vapor soaked into the curtains. That's enough. A flash: him standing in this exact spot last week, thumb on the button of a mint-flavored pen, staring at the closed diner sign from his window like it insulted him personally.

Then your palm finds the shirt you fell asleep in — the same one from the picture on some other day, but the shirt itself remembers being pulled on, and it gives that back: an ordinary Tuesday morning, him standing in his kitchen with a mug of coffee going cold, reaching for this same navy shirt off the back of a chair, over his head, arm through, arm through, the small grunt he makes every time because his shoulders are wider than department-store sizing accounts for. He'd been thinking about the Hendersons' trim job, whether the tape would pull paint off the baseboard when he stripped it, whether he had enough painter's caulk left in the truck or whether that was one more stop before the job. Small worries. A whole life measured in small worries, which is its own kind of mercy.

The tattoos come alive under your own touch when your hand drifts, still half-asleep, across your own forearm — the sports crest inked there years ago on a dare with his cousin, the two of them laughing in a shop that smelled like antiseptic and weed, both of them twenty and broke and thinking a tattoo was the same thing as a plan. He'd never really followed the team since. Kept the ink anyway. Some things you don't undo just because the feeling passed.

And under all of it, steady as a second heartbeat, his body itself: twenty-four, compact, dense with muscle built by ladders and by carrying five-gallon buckets up them, shoulders that know the specific fatigue of holding a roller overhead for six hours, a body that has never once needed a knee brace, that aches in exactly no places when it wakes up, that is, compared to Ernesto, compared to eighteen other men, obscenely, embarrassingly good. His leg is already going, a small bounce against the mattress, an idle motor that never got the message he's supposed to be asleep. You feel the itch behind it — not nerves exactly, just current with nowhere to go.

There's an ex who isn't in here anywhere, not even a name attached to hurt — that particular room in him is empty and swept, and you notice the absence more than you'd notice a wound. No wife tucked into these sheets, no kid's height marked on a doorframe, nothing he's building toward that you can find by touching a pillow. Scraping by, month to month, on brush-and-roller money, and somehow it doesn't come back to you as a complaint — it comes back as the diner sign, dark on Main Street, and how he'd walk past it some nights and feel, briefly, spiritual about the whole ugly quiet town without being able to say to what.

You sit up. The room resolves — dresser, dark window, the paint bucket in the closet exhaling faintly into the dark. Your hands come up in front of your face without your permission, the leg still bouncing under you, and you turn one hand over slow, like checking it for something that should be printed on the palm.

"Didn't think I'd get picked again so soon," you say out loud, to no one, in his voice, which is lower than you expected and still finding its footing coming out of your throat, and you're not sure yet if that's true, or if it's just the first thing his mouth wanted to say once it was yours to move.