Owen Tanaka

You are Malik Ashford, four minutes into being him, standing in a Los Angeles apartment you have never seen before tonight, and the trouble is that four minutes is exactly long enough to feel the walls of a life instead of the size of it. You spun and got a body that teaches middle schoolers, that has a mortgage and a mother who calls on Sundays, and none of that is bad, it just isn't yours, and it isn't yours in a specific, itching way — this man's hands know how to grade a stack of essays and calm a room down and they do not know anything you want to know. You spun once and got him. You are already bored of the shape of that. The dimples are the same as the ones in the picture on the card behind you, oddly, Malik has them too, and some small, ugly part of you thinks: get a different set of dimples, get a different life to wear them in, see if the second stranger fits looser than the first. That is the whole reason, and it is not a good one, and you do not say it to yourself in words. You just want to spin again before you've finished being anyone.

The wheel spins and the floor is different under your feet before you've finished the thought — no floor, actually, cracked linoleum, and the ceiling is close and yellow-lit and smells of scorched milk. Your hand — his hand — is closed around a steaming pitcher, wrist cocked, and it moves wrong first, a half-inch too far, milk sheeting over the lip and onto two knuckles that don't flinch fast enough. You correct. You do it again, slow, deliberate, watching your own fingers like they belong to someone you're not sure you trust yet, which, in the strictest sense, they don't. Ten more shots after that come out checked — tamp, hiss, pour, level, tap — each one supervised by a mind that has never done this before, riding a body that has done nothing else for eleven years.

The apron strings are what open first. Tied this morning — no, last night, before the shift, in the trailer, in front of the bathroom mirror with the corner peeling silver — Owen's hands crossing the straps behind his own back on muscle memory alone while his eyes were somewhere else entirely, on his phone, on a text from Denise asking if he could take the kids Thursday even though it isn't his weekend. He said yes. He always says yes to that, and there's a small, warm, complicated ache in it, a text under the text: he still checks, every time her name lights up, for something that isn't there anymore, hasn't been there in three years, and he's dating someone now, someone easy and good and not complicated in the way that ended things with Denise, but Denise is the one his chest still does something around, briefly, before he puts the phone face-down and finishes tying the apron.

The gray shirt against your back gives you more — thrifted, soft from two hundred washes, the collar gone a little slack at the neck, and under it a body that is forty and knows it: a low ache low in the back from bending over the same three feet of counter for over a decade, a wrist that clicks on the pitcher's second turn, a strength in the forearms that surprises people who clock him first for average and small. The scalp under short dark hair prickles at the crown where it's thinning, a thing he catches in the espresso machine's chrome sometimes and looks away from fast. The studs in both earlobes were a birthday gift from his kids, picked out badly and lovingly at a mall kiosk, and he has never once taken them out.

The boots on your feet are older than the trailer's newest coat of dust — bought the year he got the diagnosis, ADHD, thirty-six years old, sitting in a beige office being told a word for a thing he'd been calling "just how I am" his whole life, and crying in the parking lot after in a way that surprised him more than the news did. The counter under your palms remembers three thousand mornings of him losing his place mid-task and finding it again, the small checked movements that look, from outside, like carefulness, and are actually a man building himself a set of rails so his mind can wander off them safely. He chants sometimes, low, under the machine's hiss, an old habit from a meditation app that stuck longer than the app did. He drinks maybe twice a month, hard, with the two other baristas who close, laughing too loud in a parking lot under a sky so clear out here it looks fake. He has never smoked and never wanted to. He has two kids who think he hangs the moon and a girlfriend asleep right now forty minutes away who does not yet know that this version of steady, this version of him, is the one she's going to get every single day, easy, unbothered, funny about the wrong things at the wrong times, dimples showing even when he isn't smiling, which is most of the time, because his face was built that way and it has nothing to do with what he feels.

You look down. The pitcher is still in your hand, milk gone lukewarm and still at the surface, a job undone in the middle of being done. You turn the hand over, slow, watching it like it might tell you something it hasn't yet.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, to the empty café at whatever hour this is out here while the whole rest of this town sleeps. "Okay."

You don't know yet if that's a good huh or a bad one. Neither does the wheel. Neither does anyone.