Paul Hideo Nakamura

You have been looking at the page for an hour, maybe two. Nothing is on. You have scrolled past everything twice, and the house is asleep around you. Then you open the tab you have kept open for days, the one with the wheel on it, and you think what you have always thought, which is that it can't be real.

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films where someone wakes up in another man's shirt. The threads at two in the morning, everyone typing as if it could happen. It has never been for sale before. You pay. You spin. The wheel slows on a man.

Then the buzzing is in your arm.

A needle is working a line into the inside of your forearm, a hot, bright scratch, and you are leaning back in a black vinyl chair with your head turned away. The green soap pools on the skin. The power dropped, and now it is back, and the machine hums on. Your jaw has come loose. The flinch is not in the arm anymore, and you turn to watch the needle work, because it is happening to furniture.

The T-shirt comes first. Cotton, washed thin, tight across a belly that sits forward when you lean back. Something opens: a morning, a kitchen, a woman's voice from the other room. *Pick one up from school, I've got the late.* His hand pulls this shirt off a hook because the clean ones are in the wash. His feeling is plain tiredness, and under it a steadiness you did not expect.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. You move your leg and the denim says a bay floor, a creeper rolled under a raised cab, grease to the elbows. Eleven years at the same shop. A boss who talks over him. Hands that know torque the way a mouth knows a word. Your right palm rests on your thigh, and the calluses are thick as leather. They want to close around a ratchet.

The chair is cool against your back, and the smell of green soap comes up sharp. That is the one that opens widest. A different chair, a hospital, two small children, and a woman who is not the one in the kitchen. He signs a paper with that same hand. The marriage ended anyway. He still sends money on the first. It is not enough, and he knows it.

Your fingers go to the pocket and find the flat shape of a pack. A pack a day. There is a flash of the porch at dusk, the mountains cut dark behind the rooflines, a lighter's thumbwheel, and the craving arriving in your mouth before you think of it. No drink, though. Not for years. He decided. The decision is in him like a bone, and you did not earn it and it holds you up anyway.

The needle bites, and the arm wants to pull. You hold it still. The hairline is cool where it has pulled back at the temples. The beard is a warm weight on your jaw.

You lift the arm into the light. Green ink, red skin, a line that is only beginning. Then you turn your hand over, the thick fingers and the wear in the creases, and you look up.

"Huh," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "That's mine."

Then comes the thought that was waiting underneath all of it. How long does this one last? The wanting is already stirring. You do not know whether you are still him tomorrow, or in four minutes.