Paul Dunleavy

Three minutes in Cody Fessenden's skin and already the itch is back, that low hum under the sternum that has nothing to do with Cody and everything to do with you. It's an Ohio night, dark and cheap-motel quiet, everybody in this house asleep, and you're standing in a grocery stocker's bedroom in nineteen-year-old bones that are lean and jumpy and not yours, freckles you keep catching in the mirror like they're somebody's joke. Cody's phone is dead on the charger. Cody's life is three minutes deep and already boring — the blond stubble, the average shoulders, a body that has never worked for anything and it shows. You didn't spin again for a reason you'd say out loud. You spun again because sitting still inside a body is the only time the wanting gets loud enough to hear, and the wheel is right there on the borrowed phone, glowing, patient, and paid for already. You spin.

The stroke of the brush stutters, restarts, slower, on the other side, working the back molars like the mouth already knows what it's doing even though the mind behind it is brand new. That's you now — mid-motion, mid-night, mid-somebody-else's-life, a mouthful of foam and a tap running warm over a sink you've never seen. You rinse twice, out of habit that isn't yours yet, and set the brush bristles-up, out of grey water that has apparently always sat there, though you have no memory of a single morning it happened before this one.

The toothbrush handle is the first thing. Cheap, ridged plastic, and it opens like a door: mornings, hundreds of them, this exact motion, this exact tilt of the head to catch the low bathroom light, a woman's voice from the bedroom saying something about the dishwasher not draining, laughing at nothing, *Paul, you're gonna wear a hole in your gums* — and you understand you are called Paul without anyone telling you.

The shirt against your back keeps giving, sleeve by sleeve: a Sunday morning three years back, pulling this same soft grey cotton over a body that had already gone soft in a way twenty-two-year-old Paul never planned on, his wife Denise laughing at the belly the way she'd laughed at everything back then, before it stopped being funny to either of them. The sleeve on the right arm, though — the ink, fine-line geometric, spiraling wrist to shoulder — that one comes in harder, a whole year: sitting in a chair in Somerville four hours at a stretch, gritting through it because he wanted one true thing on his own body that nobody handed him, that no foreman signed off on, that had nothing to do with picking orders off a rack for eleven dollars over minimum. He remembers being proud of it in a way he'd never admit to Denise, who called it a midlife thing before he'd hit thirty.

The wedding band is cold and it comes with weight, not warmth — Denise's face gone tired at the edges the last year, the apartment quieter than it used to be, and under that, guiltier and warmer both, another face: Jenna, twenty-six, gone four months now, the smell of her apartment on Dorchester Ave, the specific ache of a thing he ended and didn't stop wanting. Married and straight and faithful on paper and none of it clean in his chest.

Bare feet on cold tile bring the warehouse up through the floor — steel racking three stories of it, a forklift beeping somewhere behind an aisle, the particular soreness in his lower back that never fully leaves, hands that know without asking how to scan a barcode, how to lift with the knees and never do, how to want a cigarette he hasn't had in six years and a beer he'll definitely have tomorrow. The birthmark under your jaw is just heat when you touch it, no memory in it at all, like it belongs to nobody, like even Paul stopped noticing it around age nine.

You look down. Nails bitten short and raw at the edges, a hand already trying to find its way back to his mouth out of a boredom you haven't earned yet. You turn it over once in the bathroom light, foam still cooling on the lip, tap still running behind you into a drain that's always taken this long to clear.

You look up into the mirror, into blue eyes that were never yours, and you say, quiet, to no one awake to hear it:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."