Mateo Villalobos

The evening is nothing much, which is exactly how it's supposed to go — you've worked that out by now, years of reading the same threads at two a.m., watching the same grainy clip loops, always a little ashamed of how badly you wanted it to be real. Tonight it's just a browser tab and a dull Sunday with nothing on, and vessel.cards loading slow on a bad connection, and a wheel rendered in flat gaudy color like something from a carnival that never got built. You don't believe it. You pay anyway. You spin anyway. The wheel does what wheels do, which is take its time pretending, and then it stops, and there's a name you don't recognize and a photo of a kid with a dead-straight fringe and freckles, and you don't even finish reading before the world changes under you.

No fall. No darkness. Just the canal path arriving all at once, gravel-pale in a blue not-yet-morning, and your foot — his foot — coming down wrong for two strides, catching, recovering, like a glitch in a video that fixes itself. Breath is already going in your chest, fast and rhythmic, fogging in front of you. Something is buzzing against your wrist. Earbuds feed a stranger's playlist into ears that aren't deciding whether they like it. You are running. You did not start running. You are simply, suddenly, already four miles into it.

The shirt isn't on you yet — that's hours off, a memory and not a fact of this second — but the shorts are, the long-sleeve is, the watch is, and that's enough. Contact is the key, they say on the forums, and it turns out to be true: the fabric against your ribs gives you a flash of a dim bedroom, a wife still asleep with one arm thrown over the pillow where his pillow was, him stepping into the leggings one leg at a time by the gray square of a window, quiet so the floor won't creak. Rosa. Her name arrives with the memory of her name, unasked, the way his hand had rested a second too long on the doorframe before he left, some old habit of not wanting to leave a room without saying something to it.

The watch against the wrist opens wider: four years of mornings almost exactly like this one, the canal path worn into muscle before it was worn into thought, the water tower holding still on the horizon like a nail the whole county's hung from. The earbuds give you a half-dozen songs he doesn't actually like but runs to anyway because changing the playlist feels like a chore. And underneath the running — under the burn starting low in legs that are short and dense with a strength that has nothing to do with gyms, legs that climb ladders and kneel on concrete all day — there's a whole life filed close enough to touch.

The tool belt, when your palm remembers its weight though it isn't on you now, brings back a ceiling half-finished, conduit bellied out overhead like ribs, his foreman's voice, the particular good ache of a Friday paycheck. A different flash: the shirt, navy, a name patch that says MATEO stitched crooked because the second one always comes out crooked, and under that the morning he put it on — the actual morning, not an average of mornings but one specific one, sleeves still cool from the line, a button he fixed himself with dental floss because he was out of thread and too proud to ask Rosa for hers. The ring on the left hand is not there right now, pulled off for the run and sitting in a dish by the sink, but its ghost is there anyway, a tan line of pressure his finger has stopped noticing, the weight of a promise made two years ago in a backyard with string lights and his mother crying more than his bride did.

He is spiritual in a way that doesn't have a church attached — a thing he thinks about on this exact path most mornings, actually, the gray coming up over the mesquite and feeling like it means something even if he couldn't say what. He vapes a little at his cousin's place on weekends, drinks too much maybe once a month and regrets it exactly as much as is fun. He has never cheated, never wanted to, has nineteen years and a nervous habit of drumming his fingers against anything flat when a conversation runs long, and no history at all with anything like this, because why would he — a kid from a gravel road with a water tower for a skyline has no reason to expect that somewhere, someone is spinning a wheel with his name behind the glass.

None of that was yours a minute ago. Now it sits in you like sediment, stirred and settling, his and borrowed both.

The legs keep moving because legs do that; you let them, a few more strides, the gravel crunching under shoes that know this exact give and grade better than you ever will. Then you slow, and stop, chest working, and you lift both his hands in front of his face in the thin light — no ring on the left, just the pale ghost-band and the freckles climbing his knuckles like they climb his nose — and you turn them over once, like you're checking they're real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, your breath and his voice doing it together. "Okay. Let's see how long this one goes."