Mateo Cabrera

The screen has been the whole night. Not scrolling for anything, just scrolling, the way you do when it's late where you are and there's nothing on and hasn't been for hours. You've had this thing in you a long time — waking up as someone else, wearing a stranger like a coat, the old films and the forum threads at two in the morning where people describe it like a fever they're ashamed of wanting again. Always fiction. Always somebody else's character, somebody else's premise. Then the site: a plain page, a wheel on it, no explanation that sounds like it should work. You pay anyway. You spin because you have always wanted to, and because for the first time in your life the button is just sitting there.

The wheel stops.

You are leaning against a concrete post, phone warm in your hand, thumb already moving on a message you didn't start. Mid-shift, mid-text, mid-laugh — the muscles of a smile still deciding whether to finish. There is a pallet jack against your other hand, cold and greased. Ocean smell coming off a wet loading floor and a haze of tile-light behind you, a neon sign burning OPEN across the room. You don't travel to get here. You are just suddenly the one standing in these boots, in this vest, and everything he was mid-sentence in is now yours to finish or not.

His thumb — no, your thumb now — stutters over the keyboard. That's the half-second the rhythm breaks: one word typed wrong, backspaced, retyped slow and correct. Nobody sees it. The next boxes he touches, when the body walks back inside, will all get checked twice, on a job that stopped needing checking in years.

But first: the phone. The name on the screen — Yesenia — and touching the glass gives you nothing on its own, glass doesn't hold anything, but the weight of the phone in this specific grip does, his grip, fingers callused along the pads from cardboard edges and rope, and it opens like a door left ajar. A kitchen with bad light and good smell, her back to you at the stove, both of you barefoot on tile that's always a little sticky no six months into the lease. An argument eight months old about her sister staying too long on the couch, resolved with her laughing at something stupid he said, the specific relief of a fight that didn't become a bigger fight. Two years of mornings same as that one.

The vest against your chest — the reflective strip stiff under your knuckles when you brush it — gives you the loading dock itself, going back further than the girlfriend: the interview with a manager named Herb who's since retired, the first summer when the heat inside the trailers made grown men see spots, learning to read a manifest faster than the guy training you, the particular ache that lives now permanently between his shoulder blades from years of the same twist-and-lift, twist-and-lift. Your lower back knows this ache like an old dog knows a doorway. You are twenty-eight in this body and it already has forty years of wear filed into the knees.

The sleeve, rolled to the elbow — brushing your own forearm gives you the tattoo before you even look down at it, a black-and-gray face half-covered by cotton, and beneath your fingers comes his abuela, three years gone, the wake, the smell of the funeral home carnations, the artist's needle going for six hours while he gritted through it because it mattered more than the pain did. Grief that isn't yours sits heavy and real in a chest that isn't yours either, for a second, and passes.

The jeans — worn thin at one knee where he kneels to strap loads — carry the memory of putting them on that very morning, dark before the sun, the girlfriend still asleep with one arm thrown over the second pillow, the quiet economy of a man who's dressed in the dark a thousand times: hoodie over the head, vest zipped one-handed, the little Bahamian-lime shape of the mole on his cheek felt rather than seen, brushed once with a thumb out of habit while he checked himself in the hallway mirror without really looking. A splash of the drugstore cologne he keeps meaning to replace. The dip can in the vest pocket, a shape your hand already knows to reach for and doesn't, yet.

Under your tongue there's the ghost-taste of tobacco from earlier in the shift, and your feet — steel-toe boots, laces double-knotted his particular way — ache pleasantly with the specific fatigue of hour six, not hour one. There's an old ex-girlfriend somewhere back in there too, a name that surfaces once, Carla, tied to a version of him ten years younger and much angrier, gone now, not missed exactly but not erased either. Church on Christmas and Easter and the occasional guilty Sunday. Big nights out once or twice a month that always start as "just one" at the same bar three blocks from the apartment.

None of it is yours. All of it is right here, sitting in muscle and mole and denim, waiting for a hand to touch the next thing and hand over one more piece.

You look down. The phone is still lit, her name still on the screen, his — your — thumb hovering over letters that don't finish the sentence he started. You turn the hand over slowly, watching the calluses catch the neon light bleeding in off the floor, and it does not feel like your hand, because it never was.

"There you are," you say to no one, to the mole in the corner of your eye you can't see, to the ocean smell, to whoever might be listening on the other side of a phone screen — and you don't know yet if that's the last thing this mouth says as you, or the first of many. Nobody does. Not even the wheel.