Nathan Ruskovich

The office in Anchorage is still dark when you decide. You are Everett Halloran — you have been him less than a minute, standing in an entryway that smells like someone else's cologne, someone else's coffee grounds gone cold in a mug on the counter — and already you know the shape of the boredom coming. A corner office. A wife you have not met. Forty-six years of somebody's decisions laid out ahead of you like a hallway with all the doors already chosen. You spun for this an hour ago in a different body and you are already reaching for the site again on a phone that is technically not yours yet, the CEO's face lit blue in his own dark kitchen, and you tell yourself it isn't restlessness, it's curiosity, though by now — spin seven hundred and eighty-two — you know better than to believe your own reasons. The wheel doesn't care. You pay. You spin.

Two thousand miles southeast and three hours ahead, a set of hands you have never had stop working.

The fence post is warm under your palm — his palm — and the zip tie is halfway pulled through the mesh, and the motion that should take a quarter-second stutters, unspools, comes apart into its component pieces like a word you've said ten thousand times suddenly sounding foreign in your own mouth. You pull it through again. Slowly. Correctly. Then the next one, and the one after, each a small checked thing on a job that stopped needing checking years before you arrived in it. Sun on the back of a bald head. Boots already gray with the same dust as the road. Somewhere behind you, a stoplight cycles red to green for nobody.

The radio mic clipped at his collar is what opens first — cheap plastic warm from the sun, and under your fingers when you touch it without deciding to, a hundred mornings arrive: the truck idling, the coffee thermos sweating rings onto the dash, a supervisor named Deb who laughs like a door slamming. You did this ten thousand times and never once thought about your hands doing it. That's the freckled arm's own knowledge coming up through the touch, not yours — muscle memory with feeling stitched into it, dumb and total, the way the fence tension has to be checked at the base or it isn't checked at all.

The shirt is what gives you the rest. Cotton-poly, tucked in tight, sleeves rolled to the same fold every morning for eleven years — and there he is, this morning, this exact one, standing in front of a mirror with a fluorescent tube buzzing overhead, one hand smoothing the collar flat while the other checks the wedding band is turned right-side up, the way he always does, though he couldn't tell you why. His wife was still asleep. There'd been a fight two nights before — not really about anything, about a text he didn't delete fast enough from a woman named Renee who isn't in his life anymore except in the small ways an ex stays, showing up in a song, in a joke he almost tells and doesn't. He loves his wife. He is fairly sure of that the way you're sure of directions you've driven blind — not because you're thinking about it, because you never have to.

The cigarette pack in his breast pocket presses a rectangle into your chest and gives you the parking lot behind the station, five a.m., the particular quiet of a small Ohio town before the diner would've opened, if the diner still opened. Menthols. A pack a day, more on double shifts, and he quit twice and both times came back to it the way you come back to a name you almost forgot. The boots on your feet know the give of this exact stretch of dirt, this fence, the sound a coyote makes at 2 a.m. that isn't a coyote. And under the boots, under the sun, under all of it — something quieter. A meditation app he never tells the guys at the station about. A small brass Buddha the size of a thumb, riding in the truck's cupholder, that his wife gave him and he touches sometimes at red lights, when there's a light to be at, which there mostly isn't out here.

The freckles on the backs of your — his — hands have a story too, sunscreen forgotten a thousand times, a mother in Toledo who used to call them angel kisses, an irritation he never got over being called that as a grown man in green.

You stand there holding a fence tie, wearing forty-six years you didn't earn, and his fingers — already, before you've told them anything — start to drum against his thigh, an old tell, an idle tic that has outlasted every version of him that came before this one.

You look down at the hand doing it like it belongs to someone standing just out of frame.

Then you look up, into the heat shimmer over the fence line, and you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't yours yet but will answer to your name today: "Okay." Just that. The whole decision folded into one flat syllable, Ohio sun on a shaved head, a wedding band, a coyote fence, a job that isn't yours until, without warning, it is.