Richard Nuzzo

The site loads slow on a phone that's too old for it, and the wheel just sits there spinning lazy colors while the evening goes nowhere. Monday, the bad kind, the kind with nothing at the end of it but the next one. You have read about this corner of the internet the way you've read about it for years — forums, grainy testimonials, the same five photographs reused by people who wanted it to be true badly enough to say so. Vessel.cards. You pay because the price is the only thing that feels real about it, and then you spin because that's what the button is for, and the wheel clicks down through names you never get to see and stops.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no sense of having gone anywhere. There is a pan. There is a wooden spoon in a hand that was not, a half-second ago, yours to call a hand. The stirring is already happening — slow circles through browned ground meat and onion — and it stops, and starts again the other way, like something correcting a mistake nobody made. Salt goes into the pan from a shaker that knows exactly how far to tilt. You do not taste it. A cabinet opens above the counter and a second plate comes down, white, chipped at one edge, and it goes down next to the first one, side by side, two places where a minute ago there was one.

The body underneath you is sixty-three years old and it carries that the way a house carries its settling — not pain exactly, but a looseness in the lower back, a stiffness behind the knees that the standing hasn't worked out yet, shoulders that know this counter's height without checking. Bald head warm where the kitchen window throws afternoon light across it. Jeans worn soft at the thigh. The t-shirt is grey and it is the thing you are touching most, against your spine, under your arms, and it gives first — a flash of a dresser drawer, a hand (his hand) pulling this exact shirt over this exact head three hours ago, a small domestic nothing, except underneath it there's a whole morning: coffee on the porch, the metal rail of it sun-warmed, a mug with a chip matching the plate's, the quiet that comes after thirty-some years in casino security and nothing left to get up early for.

The spoon is the deepest thing he's touching and it opens the most. Richard at a stove more times than can be counted, alone more of those times than not, and before that — not alone. A woman's voice in this kitchen, years back, telling him he over-salts everything and him doing it anyway because habit outlives marriage. The marriage itself comes through sideways, worn down to a feeling rather than a scene: something that ended slow, the way a pilot light goes out and you don't notice till you reach for warmth that isn't there. A daughter, grown, living somewhere with a different area code, a birthday card he mailed late. And more recent, sharper, a woman younger than him who was here not long ago — her laugh in this room, her hand on this counter, and then not, a door that closed itself without much drama, the kind of ending that leaves a second plate in the cabinet out of pure muscle memory, out of a body that hasn't caught up to eating alone again.

His faith sits in him quiet and unshowy, a church ten minutes from here, a Sunday habit older than the marriage and the divorce both, something he leans on without examining it, grace said over meals even when the meal is just for one. He quit drinking so long ago the wanting isn't even a memory anymore, just an absence shaped like other absences. His hands — your hands now — want to go to his mouth, worry at a nail, an old tell he's carried since before any of it, before the wedding, before the badge, before Vegas even, back to some boy's version of nervous. The hands know the stove. They know the spoon. They do not know, cannot know, that the second plate is already wrong, already for nobody, and they set it down anyway because the hand that set it down isn't thinking, it's remembering, and memory doesn't update that fast.

You stand in sixty-three years of settled weight, in a shift's worth of stiffness, in a kitchen that smells like browned meat and old linoleum and someone else's whole unremarkable life, and you look down at the hand holding the spoon. It is not yours. It has never been yours. The nails are bitten short, the knuckles a little swollen, a thin white scar of nothing in particular — no, there's nothing like that, just skin, just weather, just sixty-three years of ordinary use.

You set the spoon down across the pan.

"Didn't realize I did that," you say, out loud, to the empty room, looking at the second plate like it's the only strange thing here — which, for now, it almost is.