Reginald Ashby

The boat is called the Sedna's Pride and it smells like diesel and herring guts, and you are standing at the rail in Danny Choi's body watching the lights of Anchorage smear against a sky that never quite goes black in June. Your hands — his hands, nineteen years old, callused across the palm in a way that took years you didn't live — ache from six hours of hauling line. Somebody below deck is laughing at something. You don't laugh. You feel the cold work its way up through boots that are a half size too big, and you feel, underneath all of it, the specific tiredness of being strong and young and completely unable to stop thinking about how many more decades this body has to get through them in. Danny has a girl in Kodiak he hasn't called back. Danny has a captain who yells. Danny, whoever he actually is under what's left of him, is gone, and what's left is a good arm and a bad attitude you inherited along with the muscle, and six hours was enough. You want the wheel. You always want the wheel. You go below, you find the light of your phone, you open vessel.cards with herring blood still under one thumbnail, and you spin.

The porch chair takes your weight before you know you have weight to take. No — there is no porch, there is no coffee, there is a bed, unmade, dark, a seam of streetlight cutting the curtain like a struck match, and you are lying face down in it with one arm hanging off into the cool of the room. The breath that was ragged goes even in the space of a single inhale. The arm rises on its own, folding up and in, and you feel the whole body turn onto its back beneath you like it has decided something without asking. Hands come to rest, folded, on a chest that rises slow. You did not do that. It happened while you were only just arriving, the body's own habit reaching for a shape it has never once made in sleep.

It is not morning here. The gap in the curtain is streetlight, not sun — the wheel's page said *porch, coffee, mid-morning*, and that is a Thursday that has not come yet, hours off, while this Thursday is the deep dead middle of the night in Phoenix, everyone on this street asleep, the saguaros outside standing like held breath in the dark. A retired man does not usually lie flat on his face at this hour with a wife breathing two feet away. But there's a soreness low in the back when you shift the hips slightly, an old ache riding the hip joints, and a looseness in the gut that isn't fat exactly, just sixty-two years settling downward the way it does — and you understand, before any memory tells you so, that this is a man whose sleep does not come easy or on schedule anymore, who is up at strange hours for reasons his body already knows.

The sheet under your — his — palm gives the first flash: cotton gone thin at a corner from years of one hand always gripping it there before sleep. A woman's weight beside you, breathing, unbothered — Carol — and the name arrives whole, unasked, riding in on the smell of her lotion on the pillow between you. Thirty-one years married. You feel it not as a fact but as a body-memory: her cold feet finding his shins under blankets in every winter of three decades, the small furious joy of a fight about nothing in a kitchen in 1994, the two of them dancing badly at somebody's quinceañera because their son married into a family that danced. The son. A flash of him small, sticky-handed, at a table in this same house, and then grown, visiting rarer than either of them says out loud, and something in the chest — Reginald's chest, not yours — tightens around that the way it always has, a low ongoing grief with no name, love with nowhere current to land.

Your palm finds the ring on the third finger, plain gold, worn thin along the underside from four decades of turning it in idle moments, a habit that isn't gum but might as well be. It brings back a courthouse in 1991, a suit too big in the shoulders, Carol laughing at something the clerk said, both of them twenty-nine and certain about nothing except each other. The freckles across your nose — his nose — you cannot see them but you feel where they are, feel decades of people commenting on them, feel a mother long dead saying *just like your daddy's* over a kitchen table in a city that isn't this one.

The shirt is not on you yet in this room — it's a T-shirt, worn, and your bare arms against the sheet bring back yesterday morning instead: the green jacket zipped against a chill that burns off by ten, the striped polo underneath tucked and re-tucked twice because the collar sat wrong, gray chinos pulled on standing at the closet with one hand on the doorframe for balance because bending at the knee this early does something ugly to the left one now. Sneakers, the good orthopedic kind, laced loose because his feet swell some mornings and he's stopped fighting it. A whole unremarkable dressing, remembered now with more tenderness than it was lived with — the ordinary weight of clothes on a body that has decided, somewhere in the last few years, not to hurry anymore.

Under it all: the body itself, honest about what it is. Skinny fat, soft over what used to be something, a gut that surprised him around fifty-five and never left. The bald head that gets cold faster than it used to. Knees that complain on the porch steps. Hands that don't shake yet, thank God, and still know, without being told, how to hold a coffee mug just so, thumb hooked through, a grip built over sixty-two years of mornings. Catholic to the bone in a way that isn't about mass anymore so much as the cross over the bed you can feel is there without opening your eyes, and a rosary somewhere in a drawer that Carol touches more than he does now. No cigarette ever wanted, but the jaw works anyway, chewing at nothing, a habit with no name and no need for one.

The eyes open. Dark room, streetlight, Carol's shape beside you rising and falling.

You lift the folded hands off the chest and hold one up into the thin gold seam of light, turning it — the freckled back of it, the plain ring catching what little there is to catch — like it belongs to somebody you're about to be introduced to.

"Didn't think it'd be this one," you say, quiet, not enough to wake her, and your jaw is already working, chewing at nothing, sixty-two years old and brand new.