Nikhil Shenoy

Andrés Villagrán's kitchen is quiet on a Saturday, and that quiet is the whole problem. You have been him for less than a minute — long enough to feel the ache already sitting in his lower back, the particular way his knees don't like the tile — and you already know you don't want the rest of the day in this body. There's a stack of unopened mail on the counter with his name on it, over and over, like the world keeps confirming something you already regret. Coffee's gone cold in a mug shaped like a moose, someone's idea of an Alaska joke. You spun for something new forty-one times and this is what came up, an accountant with a sore back on a gray morning, and the wanting is already back before the coffee is. You don't decide so much as notice your hand has found the phone.

The site loads the way it always does, patient, the wheel already spinning behind the button before you've touched anything. You pay. You spin. There's no drumroll you can feel, no long fall — just the small tearing-away, and then weight arrives from somewhere else entirely, all at once, like a coat someone throws onto you from behind.

You are shorter. That's the first thing, the floor closer than it was, and thinner in a way that isn't strength, the softness sitting low around the middle. Your head is bald under a lamp's warm light, skin cool there, unfamiliar. Your hands are up near your own jaw, thumb and forefinger pinching at something small — a phone case, tilting it — and in front of you, propped against a coffee mug, a screen holds a face that is almost yours but younger, smoothed, the eyebrow scar gone. Then the filter drops, mid-frame, and the real face underneath — this face, the one you're wearing now — holds still in the phone's little mirror, blinking once. Your hand, not knowing yet that it isn't your hand, turns the jaw toward the lamp, checking one side, then the other, the way he always did, out of habit, before he understood the habit was already being borrowed.

The shirt is what opens him first — thin cotton, worn soft at the elbows, a color he thinks of as "the blue one," and just touching its sleeve gives you the morning he put it on: standing in this same hallway before a shift that started at eleven at night, the hallway light off because his wife was still asleep down the hall with both kids piled into her side of the bed, the little one's foot in her ribs. He'd dressed in the dark on purpose, sleeves found by feel, out of a fondness for not waking anyone up. He works nights at a lobby desk downtown, and Saturday morning for him is not morning at all — it's the tail end of a night, exhaustion sitting behind his eyes like sediment, and he'd have gone to bed hours ago except his phone buzzed with a video from an old friend, a filter everybody was doing, and some tired, boyish urge said try it, see what you looked like at twenty, before the eyebrow, before any of this.

That eyebrow. Your fingers drift there without meaning to and it comes back sideways and whole: nine years old, a bicycle, his cousin's driveway in Fremont, the particular white flash of pain and his mother's hands pressing a dish towel to his face harder than felt necessary. The scar had embarrassed him for a decade and then stopped mattering the day a woman named Priya told him, in a parking garage after a work party, that she liked it, that it made his face look like it had a story worth asking about. That was years before the wife. Priya doesn't call anymore, but some nights at the desk, watching nobody come through the lobby doors, he still turns her name over like a coin he never spent.

The wedding band is warm from his own hand's heat and gives you a wedding — outdoor, string lights, his mother crying happily into a shawl, his wife's laugh loud enough that the DJ complained about the mic feedback. Two kids after that, a girl who is four and terrified of the vacuum, a boy who is one and terrified of nothing yet. He clicks a pen at his desk all night without noticing, an old tic from exam halls, and the doctor last spring said his blood pressure needs watching, said it kindly but firmly, the way doctors say the things men his age don't want to hear. He has never had a drink in his life, never smoked, has sat through every office party nursing a soda water like it was armor. He is, by the only math that matters to him, a good man doing an unglamorous job so that two small people can have a life with more give in it than his did.

Your feet are planted on hardwood in cheap sneakers, laces a little frayed, and under them you can feel the whole night still in his legs — the standing, the pacing of a lobby at 3 a.m., the specific tiredness of a body that clocked out and then stayed up instead of sleeping because a stranger's app promised to make him twenty-two again. The phone screen has gone dark now, filter forgotten, his own true face caught in it faint as a reflection in a window.

You look down at his hands — soft-knuckled, faintly trembling with fatigue, the ring catching the lamp — and you turn them over slowly, the way he might if he'd never seen them, wondering what a stranger's hands feel like from the inside when they are, for now, the only hands you have.

You lift your eyes to the phone's black glass like it's the only eye in the room.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in his tired, unhurried voice. "Let's see who I am today."