Nikhil Bhandari

The tab has been open for forty minutes. Not because you were deciding — you decided years ago, somewhere around the first time a movie let a man wake up behind another man's eyes and you felt that specific hunger that never had anywhere to go. You decided through every 3 a.m. thread about it, every story you read twice. You decided tonight scrolling through nothing, a bright flat late morning on your side of it, nothing due, nothing good on, the particular boredom that isn't restlessness so much as a door standing open. vessel.cards. A wheel, rendered a little too cleanly, like a slot machine that knows it's being watched. You tell yourself you're testing it. You pay anyway. You spin.

There is no sensation of going anywhere. There is a mouth, not yours, working a toothbrush along a lower molar on the right side, foam gone a little thin and watery, and then it is yours, mid-stroke, and you simply are the one doing it. No fall, no door. The brush stutters once against enamel — a half-beat of nothing, like a skipped word — and then keeps going, slower now, like whoever is driving has to relearn where the back teeth are. You rinse. You rinse again, out of some instinct that isn't yours yet. You stand the brush up bristle-first against the glass, which is wrong, which has never once been how it sits in this cup, and you don't know that it's wrong, not yet, not with anything like a reason.

The tap is still running. You reach to shut it and the hand that does it is thick through the wrist, compact, the knuckles a little swollen the way hands get when they've carried too many stacked plates too many nights in a row. Freckles scattered warm across the backs of the fingers. Not your hand. His hand, and already, touching the faucet handle, something arrives that isn't memory so much as weather — the specific ache of a Friday double, the smell of fry oil that doesn't wash out of a shirt collar no matter what you do to it.

The shirt. It's not on him now — a soft worn black t-shirt instead, sleep clothes — but the ghost of the other one, the work one, rises anyway, called up by the smell still caught in his skin: a morning that already happened once today from his side of it, hours and hours ago, sleeve by sleeve, cuffs turned twice to sit just under the elbow, pen clipped into the chest pocket because the host stand never has one when you need it. Nikhil Bhandari dressing in a bedroom with a window unit rattling in the frame, humming nothing, the ring of keys already looped onto his belt before his pants are even buttoned because he has lost that ring exactly once, four years ago, and promised himself never again. The studs in both ears go in last, a habit from some older version of himself who used to care more about looking a certain way and still, a little, does.

More comes, now that the hand is open to it — the whole shape of a shift arriving at once the way a smell brings back a whole house. The host stand, laminate worn pale where a thousand forearms have leaned on it. The particular Friday-night sound of a dining room at full capacity, every table a different volume. The walk-through he does before service, counting high chairs, checking the reservation book twice because the system drops names when it's busy and he doesn't trust it, has never trusted it, not since the night it ate a party of twelve and he had to eat the apology himself, table by table, smiling the whole time. He is good at that smile. He has had this job three years and the one before it was worse and he does not think about the one before that at all.

There's a woman he almost married — not a wound exactly, more a door he closed carefully, the kind of ending with no villain in it, just two people wanting different weather. Nobody since who mattered enough to leave a mark the shirt would remember. There's his mother's voice on the phone every Sunday, a diya he lights without quite believing anymore and lights anyway, because stopping would cost more than doing it. There's the gravel crunch of his own driveway, the water tower a mile off holding the last light every evening like it's rationing it. There's a vape he's not supposed to still be using and does, out behind the dumpsters, five minutes stolen between the second and third seating, a cigarette on the real bad nights. There's his hands clicking a pen against the reservation book a hundred times a shift without him once noticing he's doing it, a tic so old it isn't even nervous anymore, just weather.

He should be mid-shift right now, somewhere in the second seating, keys on his hip, pen in his pocket, dining room roaring. He is not. He is standing at a sink in sweatpants with his teeth just brushed, and the oddness of that — a Friday night emptied out early, a man home and horizontal when he should be running a floor — sits in the body like a held breath, unexplained, already fading, because whatever reason he had for coming home early tonight was his, and it left with him.

You look down. The hand is still faintly wet from the tap, freckled to the wrist, stronger than any hand you've ever had reason to call your own. You turn it over once, studying the lines of someone else's palm like you could read an entire stranger's life out of it, and in a way you just did.

You look up into the mirror, into brown eyes that are doing something they didn't do a second ago.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in his voice. "Okay."