Mel Halbrook

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You are Grant Pellicane for four more minutes, and you already hate it. Twenty-six, paint-flecked knuckles, a scar through the eyebrow you didn't earn and don't feel, sitting on the tailgate of a truck that isn't yours in a job you haven't done a day of. The house painter's memory keeps trying to surface — some argument with a foreman, some woman's name — and you don't want it. You spun for a body and got a hangover you never drank into. This is the trouble with taking whatever the wheel gives you: sometimes it hands you a man mid-argument with his own life, and you have to sit in the argument for however long you stay.

So you don't stay. You never do. Four minutes is generous, for you.

You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, which somehow still works, and the wheel spins under your borrowed hand, and it lands.

—

The ring light gutters once, a small electrical stutter, and in the space of that flicker you are behind his eyes instead of your own — no seam, no travel, just his weight arriving all at once, heavier than the boy you left, softer through the middle, planted on a stool with a laptop screen glowing VIEWER COUNT: 4. Your mouth is already open, mid-word, and you have to finish the word or the four people watching will know something is wrong before you do. "—so anyway that's the— the app, that's basically it," you say, and your own voice comes out unfamiliar and slower, careful, like a man reading a road sign in fog. The comments keep scrolling. Nobody typed anything that matters. You lean in until the lens is nothing but a face, freckled, jowled, tired around the eyes, and behind that face you are getting your first real footing.

The shirt is what opens first — plain black tee, worn soft, a little tight over the stomach — and through it comes a Tuesday from some spring, him buying three of these exact shirts because the shrink-wrap said "relaxed fit" and he'd laughed alone in the store at what a marketing department will call a body like his. The shorts against his thighs bring back sitting on this exact stool an hour ago deciding whether to even do this, whether trying some app his coworker Deb sent him — "you'd be good at this, Mel, you always got something to say" — was a middle-aged man embarrassing himself in front of a Funko shelf. He'd decided: what the hell. Nobody's watching anyway. Four viewers proved him right.

The tattoo on the right arm comes up warm under your palm when you shift your weight onto it — black tribal bands, done twenty years ago in a shop in Dorchester with a friend who is dead now, both of them nervous and thrilled, both of them twenty-something and sure it meant something permanent about who they were. It did. It still does. Under the ink the arm is strong in a specific, un-glamorous way — twelve years of carrying a mail satchel uphill on Boston streets that don't believe in flat ground, shoulders that ache on Sundays and nowhere else.

More comes, uninvited, stacked on top of itself: the divorce, amicable as divorces go, seventeen years of marriage ending not with a bang but with both of them admitting, gently, over dishes, that something had been missing the whole time and neither of them could name it — he found out what, later, quietly, to himself, in his fifties, a word he'd never had cause to reach for before. Ace. It fit like a key turning. Two kids raised anyway, loved anyway, Dustin the younger one, off in Phoenix now with a badge and gray eyes like his mother's, calling every Sunday like clockwork. A boyfriend for eight months last year, Paul, who left not cruelly but tiredly, who said "I don't think you actually want this the way I want this" and was right, and it still sits in Mel's chest some nights like a low hum, missing a person he didn't want the way people usually mean want.

The stool under him, the bag strap ghost-memory of the actual satchel across yesterday's shoulder, the smell of the room — cardboard, cable dust, the particular plastic smell of a hundred vinyl figures watching from a shelf he's proud of and never mentions to anyone at work — his leg is bouncing, has been bouncing the whole stream, a habit older than any memory attached to it, just a body doing what it does. High cholesterol, a cigar twice a year on the porch on his birthday, a beer at Christmas if someone else opens it first. Steady. Solvent. Boring, he'd say, and mean it fondly.

You feel all of it land at once, the whole quiet decent unremarkable weight of a man's Saturday, mid-sentence, mid-nothing.

You look down at your own hand — his hand, spotted faintly, a working man's hand, the freckles running clean off the knuckle — and you turn it over slowly in the ring light like you're checking it's real. Then you lift your eyes back into the lens, into the four strangers still scrolling past you unbothered, and you say, quieter than his usual cadence, almost gentle with it:

"Anyway. That's me."