Nathan Ozawa

The evening has no shape to it. Scroll, scroll, the blue light doing what it does, and somewhere in the tenth or twentieth dead-end thread you land on a page that is just a wheel, plain as a raffle, and the words underneath it that should mean nothing and mean everything to you: you spin, it gives you a man. This is not new, the wanting — you have had it since before you could name it, since the first time a movie let two people trade skins and you felt something in you turn over and say *that, I want that, not to watch it, to have it.* It has been years of wanting a thing that was never for sale. Tonight it is. You pay. You do not believe it will work. Your thumb is already moving before your believing catches up.

The wheel spins and there is no seam at all between the spin and the standing.

You are upright, mid-reach, a paper light in your fingers, and the hand is not yours — smaller-boned than you expected of nothing in particular, tan at the wrist, a callus riding the side of the middle finger. Fluorescent light overhead. A desk edge under the heel of the other hand. Through glass to your left, a stoplight cycling red to nobody, and a diner sign gone dark behind it. The motion you were in the middle of — paper to folder — finishes wrong, drops the sheet an inch off true, and you feel the correction happen almost on its own, the hand pausing, backing up, doing it again slow and right. Then again. And again, ten more times, checking a filing motion that this hand has not needed to check in years.

It is the shirt that gives him to you first — navy polo, warm from a body's morning, the collar remembering a smaller size of him, a leaner year, and then it is not a memory of cloth anymore but of a hanger in a closet in a two-bedroom rental with the good light in the morning, and his boyfriend's voice from the kitchen asking if he's wearing that again, teasing, and the small laugh that answer got out of him, and picking the same shirt anyway because it was Wednesday and Wednesday shirts don't matter. His hands did the buttons without looking, the way they do everything without looking, top to second-to-last, top button always left open at the collar because a manager who buttons all the way up is trying too hard, and that was something he decided once, years ago, and never unmade.

The belt gives you more — buckling it standing at the mirror, sucking in half a breath out of habit though there was nothing to suck in for, this body kept lean by a leg that will not sit still, a leg that is bouncing right now under the desk though the desk is gone from under it, bouncing against nothing, an idle motor that has run since before he can remember why. Basketball in a driveway that isn't there anymore, a father who didn't come to games and a mother who came to all of them, incense in a house that smelled like it on Sundays, the small brass bowl he still keeps though he couldn't say when he last really prayed into it, more habit than faith and both of those are also faith. The badge clipped at his hip is warm where it sits against a hip bone that has ached, faintly, since a fall off a bike at nine, an old ache that flares in cold rooms, and this room is cold, and it is flaring now, distant and familiar as weather.

The floor under the shoes gives you a whole year — this floor, this carpet tile, the smell of drip coffee going bitter in the break room, the door he keeps propped open on purpose because a manager who closes his door is a manager people stop telling things to, and he learned that the hard way, in his first year, closing it too much, and had to unlearn it. Somewhere behind the sternum, under a heartbeat going a little quick for reasons that are not yours, is the shape of a man across a dinner table last week, laughing at something not that funny, and the warm, unfinished, ongoing feeling of that — of someone who is not going anywhere, who does not need you to perform anything, who has never once asked what your father thinks of you and never will. You don't get his name. You get only the feeling shaped like one, sitting where a name should be.

And under all of it, plain, physical, yours to carry now: thirty years in a frame that runs efficient and warm, shoulders that know a task ten thousand times over, a middle finger callus from a stapler worked one-handed for a decade, feet a half size too big for these shoes bought on sale two winters back, and the leg, always the leg, ticking under a desk that is behind you now, in a room with a stoplight outside cycling for no one, red, red, red, at whatever small hour this is on a street with one closed diner and no cars to stop for.

You look down. The paper is still between two fingers, held light, exactly where it was. You turn the hand over once, slow, watching it not answer to any memory you actually own.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty glass office, and it isn't really to anyone. "Okay."

You don't know how long you keep him. You don't know when the wanting comes back, or whose it will be next. For now the leg under the desk starts, unbidden, to bounce.