Rafael Concepción

The wheel is just a page, and the page is ugly in the way honest things sometimes are — plain white background, a circle of colored wedges, a button that says SPIN in a font someone chose without thinking too hard about it. You have read every thread about this for years. Every story, every argument about whether it could be real, every grainy screenshot somebody swore was proof. Monday evening, nothing on, the kind of scroll that isn't looking for anything anymore. Then a link, and the link works, and the card asks for money like it's a subscription to a magazine, and you pay it before the part of you that doubts things can catch up. You spin. The wheel does what wheels do. It slows down over a wedge with no name on it, only a small circle of a man's face, and then it stops.

You arrive already lying back on a bed that isn't a bed you know, in a green shirt that fits a chest that isn't yours, and the phone in your hand is still warm from another man's grip. On the screen a stranger's photo keeps smiling up at you a beat too long — the swipe should have cleared it, should have moved on to the next card, but instead it holds, and holds, and your mouth — his mouth — is already trying the shape of a smile at it, testing it once, then again, like a man rehearsing in a mirror he doesn't know is there. The screen dims to black glass and gives you back a face. Not yours. His.

It comes in through your palm first, off the phone case — a hairline crack along one corner, worn smooth where a thumb rides it — and with it a flash of a break room, fluorescent light, someone laughing at something on this same screen. Then more, faster: a woman's voice saying *just try it, Rafi, everybody's on one of these apps now, doesn't mean anything*, a joke between them worn soft with age, twenty years of it. He loves her. That part arrives whole and unquestioned, the way true things do — not romance exactly anymore, something with more furniture in it, three kids' worth of furniture, orthodontist bills and one of them still afraid of the dark at eleven. He downloaded this thing because his sister-in-law sent it as a bit, a dare, *see who swipes on you, old man,* and he'd laughed and said he wouldn't, and then three slow nights in a row he had.

The shirt against your back gives you the morning it went on — sleeve, then sleeve, standing in a bathroom with a mirror fogged at the edges, humming something with no name to it, gap-toothed grin at nobody. Under that: the white coat, heavier memory, years of it — the particular quiet of the pharmacy in the hour before lunch, amber bottles catching the light like a wall of low sun, the small tray with its two grooves, the flat plastic edge of a spatula worn shiny at the tip from splitting a thousand tablets exactly in half. His hands know that motion without him. They know counting by fives without looking. They know the practiced kindness of a voice explaining side effects to somebody scared of them.

The mattress under you gives up the apartment itself — no, not apartment, the words correct themselves, house, Bay Ridge, a stoop out front slick with rain most nights, sodium light coming orange through the blinds some evenings when he gets home late off a swing shift, the kids already fed, his wife's voice carrying up from the kitchen. He works nights sometimes, covering, and that's why late morning finds him horizontal and half-dressed on a made bed with the day already going outside — his one true morning off in a week, wasted, he'd have said, on some stranger's dare of an app, if wasted is what you call lying here with your shoes still half on, laughing at yourself a little.

There's a soreness low in the shoulders that belongs to muscle put there on purpose, gym twice a week before shift, a body kept strong past forty out of something like discipline and something like fear of what forty-one does to a man who stops. A tightness behind the sternum that isn't his heart, just the old anxiety, familiar as a coat, managed now, a small orange bottle of his own on the nightstand that he fills himself, professional courtesy, a joke he makes to no one. His hand keeps drifting to his jaw, rubbing along stubble he shaved two days ago and didn't bother with today, an old habit older than the ring on his finger, which is warm, plain, worn thin on the underside from four decades of turning it without thinking.

You feel the gap in his front teeth with his own tongue before you understand why that detail matters to you specifically — it is the one thing people say when they describe him, *Rafael, you know, the guy with the gap,* fond and unremarkable, the kind of detail that makes a stranger recognizable to a whole neighborhood pharmacy's worth of regulars.

The phone is still in your hand. His hand. You look down at it — thick fingers, a scar along one knuckle from something you don't have the memory for yet, the wedding band catching the window light — and you turn it over slowly, back to front, like checking it for a seam.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in his voice, and you don't know yet if you'll still be standing in it tomorrow.