Rafael Osorio

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The site loads slow, like it doesn't trust you either. A grey wheel on a grey page, vessel.cards, no explanation beyond a single line of copy: *a real man, right now, no travel, no warning.* You've wanted this since you were a kid falling asleep to the idea of it — not any one story, just the mechanism, the swap itself, the impossible math of being someone else behind their own eyes. It has always been fiction. It has never, until this exact dead Sunday, been a button you could press. You have nothing else going on. You press it.

There's no countdown. There's no light. There's a fork in your hand and it's halfway to a mouth that isn't a mouth you recognize as yours because there was no yours a second ago, and the mouth closes, and the fork — his fork — lowers itself to the counter with a small metal sound, and you are standing in a kitchen you have never seen, overhead light too warm and too yellow, window gone fully black with night behind it, a jacket still on your shoulders like it forgot to leave. You are small. Not weak-small — dense, compact, like all the mass got pulled in tight to a shorter frame — and your jaw is already clenched, has maybe been clenched for years, and you didn't do that, it was already set that way before you arrived.

The coat is the first thing. You shrug it off your shoulders without deciding to, muscle doing what it always does, and the canvas sliding against your arms gives you a morning: him pulling this exact jacket off a hook by a storm door, Boston air coming in grey and wet around the edges, a porch with paint peeling in strips he keeps telling himself he'll scrape this spring. Three Sundays running he's told himself that. The storm door sticks and he knows exactly which hip-check opens it.

You sit, because he's sitting, because the body wants the stool under the counter and takes it, and the vinyl seat cold through his jeans brings up a whole year of closing out registers on stools just like it — his own stool, his own register, OSORIO HARDWARE stencilled gold on the window of a shop four blocks from here. His father's name before it was his. You feel the shape of that pride land somewhere under the sternum, heavier than you expected, older than thirty-two years should allow, like it got handed down already worn in.

The fork again, back in his hand, and it keeps feeding him in the same even mouthfuls it's been doing for who knows how long before you got here — chicken and rice going cold in a paper container, and the taste of it, bland and a little burnt at the edges, drags up the whole last two years at once: the shop doing fine, better than fine, the kind of fine where you can finally stop flinching at the number on the lease renewal. A clipboard under one arm most mornings. Keys — a whole ring of them, the shop's three locks and a storage unit and an apartment that used to be two people's and is now just his — weighing down one jean pocket right now, cold against his thigh through the denim, and touching that weight brings her back whole: an ex who used to sit on this exact counter swinging her feet while he closed up receipts, who used to tell him he worked too much, who was right. He still has her number. He has never once used it past eleven at night out of something that isn't quite pride and isn't quite faith, though the faith is in there too, old Sunday mornings, a church three blocks past the shop he still goes to though less than his mother would like.

The goatee itches where his own jaw is clamped down on nothing, an old tic, older than any of this — a man who grinds his feelings down into his back teeth instead of saying them, who has never once told anyone when something actually hurt. His shoulders know forty-pound bags of concrete mix without being asked. His palm, resting flat on the counter now, knows the particular give of a key cut wrong before it's tried in a lock. None of that is yours. All of it is suddenly right here, sitting in borrowed muscle like it had been waiting.

The container empties. The fork sets down with a small clean click against the formica, exact, the kind of precise he does without noticing, dip tin a faint shape in his back pocket he hasn't reached for tonight.

You look down. Thick fingers, a scar of callus along one knuckle you didn't earn, a mole-dark cheek reflected faint and wrong in the black window glass over the sink — his face, not catching light the way you expect a face to, because you've never once seen your own face from outside of a mirror and this is not a mirror, this is just where his eyes happen to be pointed now.

You lift them. Window, dark, the ghost of someone else's kitchen behind the reflection.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, low and a little rough with sleep that was never finished. "Okay."