Ramon Castellanos

The site loads slow, like it's being cautious with you, and the wheel sits there on a plain white page doing nothing, waiting. It is the middle of a Wednesday morning where you are, light coming flat through a window you don't describe because it doesn't matter, because none of that is the point. The point is the wheel. You have wanted to be someone else since before you can date it — not in the sad way, not escape, just the plain animal curiosity of it, what is it like in there, in a different weight, behind different eyes. Threads at two in the morning. Movies you rewatched for the one scene. A fascination with no name you were embarrassed by exactly once, a long time ago, and never again. You have never been able to buy it before. You pay. The screen says SPIN in a font too casual for what it's doing. You press it before you can think better of it, which is the only way these things get done.

He is on his side in bed, in Miami, where it is evening, late enough that the apartment has gone quiet around him. Blue light sits on one cheek. His thumb has stopped on something — stopped the way thumbs stop, not a decision, just a lull — and then it is not his thumb anymore, though nothing about it looks different from outside. It moves. Faster now, steadier, flicking past a photo he'd actually paused on half a second ago for a reason you'll never get, because that reason died with the stopping. The light keeps holding on the face. The face has quit blinking on schedule. Nobody in the room notices, because there is nobody else in the room.

You are low to the ground in a way that surprises you first — 5'4", and the mattress feels close, the ceiling feels close, the whole apartment arranged for someone who doesn't have to reach. Weight sits forward on you, soft at the middle, familiar to itself if not to you. The phone is warm in a right hand that already knows its own thumbprint on the glass, that has unlocked this exact phone eleven thousand times without looking. You are not thinking that number. The hand is.

The T-shirt against your back is the first key and it turns easy: cotton gone soft from a hundred washes, and in it, unbidden, a whole morning — not this morning, an old one, him pulling this same shirt over his head in a bathroom with the fan going, steam on the mirror, his wife's voice from the other room asking did he see the boys' cleats, and him saying hold on, hold on, and the shirt smelling like the drawer it came from, cedar and fabric softener, and underneath that the ordinary ache in his lower back from standing all day in a glass-walled office telling people in gentler words than he means it to go faster. The ring is the second key, plain and a little loose this time of year because he's lost a few pounds he's quietly proud of, and it opens a wedding he can still see in pieces — his mother crying for reasons that weren't sad, a band that played too long, Marisol's dress catching light he didn't know a camera could catch. And under that, closer, more recent, a name he doesn't let himself think in front of her: Dana. An ex who shouldn't still be a window he opens, who he hasn't talked to in four months and still, lying here tonight before you came, had thumbed halfway toward texting and then didn't, because of the two boys asleep down the hall, because of fifteen years, because some math still comes out the same way every time he does it.

The studs in both earlobes are small and he forgets they're there until something brushes them — a pillow, a collar — and when they do there's a flash of being twenty-six and getting the second one pierced on a dare he can't remember the stakes of anymore, laughing with people whose faces have gone soft at the edges in his memory. His knees know the particular give of this mattress. His knuckles want cracking, an itch low in the fingers that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with forty-seven years of a habit his wife has stopped commenting on. He is heavier through the gut than he was at thirty and he has made a kind of peace with it that shows up as nothing — no shame flaring, just weight, carried the way you carry weight you've had long enough to stop noticing.

Somewhere under all of it, further down than the shirt or the ring, there's the office — the glass walls, the door he leaves open on purpose so nobody thinks he's hiding anything, the particular tiredness of being the one who has to say it nicer. And under that, further still, two boys' names arriving soft and complete and his, the specific weight of each of them as babies, carried in arms that are, right now, yours.

The thumb stops again. You let it.

You look at the hand holding the phone — his hand, brown and soft-knuckled, the band catching the screen's light — and you turn it over slow, like checking it's attached. Then you lift your eyes off it, into the dark of the room, like there's something in there to find.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one. "Okay."

Nobody answers. You don't know yet how long you get to keep asking.