Owen Tierney

You have been scrolling for an hour and nothing has stuck. The day is over and the evening has not started. A thread about waking up in someone else's life, the kind you have read a hundred times, sends you to a link, and the link is a page with a wheel on it. It says vessel.cards. You have wanted this for as long as you can remember, in films and stories and threads at two in the morning, and nobody ever sold it. You pay. You spin. You do not believe it.

The wheel slows, and then you are standing on a sidewalk.

It is dark and blue, and the air is cold and wet. A lamp burns yellow behind you on a brick wall. Your right hand holds a plastic leash handle with its thumb on the lock. The line runs down to a small rough-coated dog with its nose in a hedge. You are mid-breath. Your weight is on the left foot. Then the dog looks up at you, ears flat.

The first thing you feel is the jacket. The cuff scrapes the back of your wrist, and the canvas smells of rain and a little of smoke. It gives you a morning: his arm going into the sleeve in a dark room, half asleep, and his sister's voice in his head saying he looks like a surveyor. He laughs, alone, in the hall. The zipper sticks halfway. He has never fixed it.

The sweatshirt under it is soft and gone thin at the neck. It gives you the Thursday ritual. He pulls it over his head and his ears catch. He checks the M of his hairline in the mirror and hates it, then tries to forget it. A small silver hoop in the left ear snags on the collar, and the old sting comes back warm. Girls at college told him it looked good. He believes one of them.

In his pocket there is a flat round tin. Your thumb finds it without being told. A nicotine pouch, and the tin brings back the craving and the guilt together. He had a beer once, then eleven, then stopped. Church helped. The hard folding chairs in the basement hall, the coffee, a man named Doug putting a hand on his shoulder. The tin is what is left of the old habit. He is trying to quit that too.

The leash handle is warm and the plastic is worn smooth where his thumb always lands. It gives you the dog, a rescue, and the day it jumped onto a bed in a rented room and decided. It is hers too, he thinks, then no, not hers anymore. That is the recent ex. A laugh in a kitchen. A box of her things on a stoop. The newer girlfriend, the one he does not quite trust himself with, texts him a heart and he never knows what to send back.

Your fingers are drumming on the handle. They have been the whole time. They cannot be still. They tap the plastic, rub the cord and pick at the zipper pull. In class they click a pen, and in a pew they fold and unfold a bulletin. He has been told to stop. He has never managed it.

The body is lean and cold at the edges. His knees are fine. His lower back has a dull ache from a mattress he cannot afford to replace. His stomach is empty, and it is early and he has not had breakfast. A laptop is waiting at home with a paper due, and a bank balance low enough that he knows it by heart. Under all of it runs a steady, quiet faith, like a pilot light.

The dog is still looking at you, and its ears are still back.

You look down at your hands. They are freckled across the knuckles, and they are his. They wind the leash twice and the hands know how. You turn one over.

"Okay," you say aloud, in his voice, to the dog. "Come on."

You do not know how long you get to be him. It could be years, or it could be until the hedge ends, and you can feel the wanting stirring already, small and patient.