Roger Dunmire

The screen is the only light in the room and it is early, too early, the kind of hour where the night hasn't let go and the day hasn't shown up yet. You have read about this for years. Threads, forums, half-joking confessions at 2 a.m. from people who wanted to believe body swapping was more than a premise. You always wanted to believe it. Nobody around you ever needed to know that. Tonight there is a page called vessel.cards and a wheel on it that looks cheap, almost insulting, and you pay anyway because the wanting has been sitting in you so long it doesn't even feel like a decision anymore. You spin.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no countdown. There is a hand — not yours, never yours — already closed around a plastic-wrapped package on a metal shelf, and a body around that hand that is not the one you have spent your life inside, and it is simply, immediately, the only body there is.

The rhythm breaks. The hand hesitates over the shelf, package half-lifted, and does the motion wrong — sets it down, picks it up again slower, checks the barcode against the handheld scanner strapped to the wrist like it hasn't been done ten thousand times already. It has. Not by you.

The aisle smells like cardboard dust and machine oil, and somewhere out of sight a forklift beeps in reverse. Neon leaks in through a loading door left cracked to the alley — pink and blue smearing across boxes that don't need it. Afternoon here, though the light coming through that door doesn't care what time your body just left. His shift started hours ago. Yours never really felt like it started at all.

The polo shirt is what gives it up first — cheap poly-blend against skin, a company logo over the heart, and under it a flash: this same shirt, this morning, pulled over his head in a bedroom still dark, wife's breathing steady behind him, the CPAP machine humming on her nightstand because his own apnea keeps them both up if he doesn't run his at night and hers at whatever hour she needs it. Thirty-one years married. He remembers — you remember, wearing him — the sleeve catching on his watch, swearing under his breath, her stirring just enough to mumble his name without opening her eyes. Not annoyed. Just checking he was there. He was always there. That's the whole shape of it.

The safety vest next, its reflective strips gone gray with washing, and a memory arrives sideways and unbidden: a woman who is not his wife, a name that surfaces and then won't quite resolve, a stretch of years back before any of the kids, a decision he made that he still turns over some nights lying awake next to the hum of his own machine, wondering. He married the right woman. He still thinks about the other one. Both of those things are true and neither of them costs him sleep exactly — they just visit.

The half sleeve on the right arm is warm from work under fluorescent light, and touching it — his own arm, your borrowed one — brings up the chair, the buzz, three sittings over two years to get a face exactly right, a portrait of his father dead nine years now, done from the one photo where the old man looked like he almost approved of something. Roger paid for it himself. Never told his brothers. It's the one vanity he let himself have in sixty-one years of not having many.

The boots know concrete. The knees know how to bend to save the back. The right hand, when it isn't gripping a scanner or a box, wants to go to the mouth — thumbnail between the teeth, an old habit forty years unbroken, worse when the kids were small and money was tighter than it is now, better now that the house is paid off and there's real weight in the accounts, though the hand never got the memo that the worry's mostly over. Three kids, maybe a fourth somewhere in there depending which version of the family gets told at Christmas. Grown now. Calling less than he'd like.

No drink in years — quit sometime in his forties, quietly, no rehab story, just stopped wanting the taste of it one ordinary week. Never smoked. Mass on Sundays when the shift allows, and guilt when it doesn't. All of it is sitting in the muscle and the shirt and the ring, waiting for a hand to touch the right thing and let it up.

You look down. The forklift beeps again, farther off now. The scanner is still in his — your — hand, mid-task, a barcode half-read.

You turn the hand over slowly, like it might not hold still, thumbnail already drifting toward the teeth out of a habit that isn't yours yet and already is.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one in the aisle. "Okay."

Nobody answers. The wedding band catches the neon bleeding in from the alley, and you stand there in a stranger's weight, not knowing yet how long you get to keep it.