Raymond Guillory

You have been looking at the page for most of an hour. It is an evening with nothing in it. You scrolled until the scrolling stopped meaning anything, and then you found the link, the one you did not believe, and underneath it a wheel. For as long as you can remember you have loved this one idea: waking up as somebody else, the films, the stories, the threads at two in the morning. It was only ever something to read. Now there is a price and a button. You pay. You press it. The wheel turns and slows, ticking over names you will never know.

Then you are lying on your side in the dark. Blue light sits on your cheek. The phone is six inches from your face, and your thumb, which is his thumb, has stopped mid-scroll. His breath is slow and wide in a chest that has plenty of room in it. The mattress dips under your hip. You start the thumb again, faster and steadier than he had it. Everything he had paused on flicks past, and you do not read any of it.

The sheet is cool and worn soft against your shin. Your ankle aches, dull and old. A lamp glows in the corner of the room, and past the shutters the street is warm and wet with steam. A ceiling fan turns over you. The cotton of the dark gray T-shirt is thin at the collar, and when you pull at it the memory comes in his feeling and not yours. It is a Saturday in a driveway, and he has washed this shirt a hundred times. His wife said throw it out, and he said no, it's broken in. He feels a small, stubborn pride about it.

The ring is cold when your thumb touches it. It comes back whole. A porch, a borrowed suit, a woman laughing at how hard his hands shook. He was thirty-one and certain of nothing except her. The two kids come in sideways, a boy's scraped knee, a girl asleep on his chest, a hospital hallway with vending-machine coffee. They arrive as one warm weight. It is love, and it is not yours.

You press your jaw into the pillow and feel the cleft in your chin with your own thumb. He hated it as a boy and she kissed it first. The knuckles crack on their own, one hand and then the other. His hands already know how, and it is a relief to him in some way you do not understand. There is something about a drink he stopped drinking, a night he does not look at, a morning he poured it out and stood very still at the sink. Nobody knows that but him, and now you do.

The faintest, strangest thought: he was happy tonight. Nothing was wrong. He was only tired and warm and pleasantly nowhere.

You turn your hand over in the blue light. The wedding band catches. The palm is broad, creased and warm, and it is yours now. You lift your eyes and say, quietly, in a voice lower than you expected, "Oh. It worked."

The phone dims in your hand. You are a stranger wearing a man who was loved, and you wonder how long you get to keep him.