Ross Delaney

The gym smells like rubber mats and old sweat, and it is eleven in the morning, and the man whose skin you are wearing right now — forty-three, birthmark riding his left cheek like a spilled coffee stain, dark brown hair going gray at the part — has just finished telling a seventeen-year-old kid to shoot for the legs, not the waist, for the ninth time this week. You have been him for less than a minute, in the sense that matters. Sixty-some years of a life you didn't earn are sitting in you like ballast, and none of it is interesting anymore. That's the thing nobody warns you about — even boredom eventually gets bored of complaining. He never made state. He talks about it like it's a war wound. You are standing in his gym, in his whistle, in his second marriage that is somehow worse than his first, and you think: not this one, not one more day of this one. Not dramatic. Just done. You have a phone in his gym bag and a card on a site called vessel.cards, and thirty seconds is all it takes to pay and put your thumb to the wheel again.

The kitchen light is a bare bulb on a cord and it is doing nothing for the room, and you are standing in it holding a plastic fork with pasta sauce cooling on the tines, and the fork stops in the air an inch from a mouth that isn't asking your permission to be a mouth. It comes back down. It sets itself on the counter, tines against Formica, without you quite deciding to. A coat slides off shoulders you have never owned. You sit — no, he sits, except there is no he anymore, there is only the sitting, and it is you doing it in a body six foot even, younger by fourteen years than the one you just left, no ache in the knees, no thickness at the waist. You finish the container in even mouthfuls. The window over the sink is dark already, though it should not be dark, should not be evening at all, not here, not for him — and that wrongness sits at the edge of you like a held breath, unexplained.

The tattoo is what opens first, because your own forearm brushes it reaching for the fork — the cross, the praying hands, half under the sleeve you haven't shrugged off yet — and it comes with a flash of a chapel you've never been in, cold stone under bare feet, an aunt's voice saying something you can't quite hear, gone before you can hold it. He got it at twenty-two, on a dare and half a bottle of something, and never went back to church again, and never told anyone that he almost regretted it and almost didn't, both, forever, a small argument he has with himself once a year.

Then the coat — the jacket, navy, salt-stiff at the cuffs — comes off his shoulders and the memory of putting it on this morning arrives whole, because his hands remember the zipper before you do: predawn cold in a Denver bungalow, mountains just a deeper black stacked behind the rooflines, him pulling the jacket over a gray shirt still creased from the dryer, stepping into jeans gone stiff with yesterday's dried lake water, lacing the boots twice because the laces are always a hair too long. Nine hours on a stand today. The chair with the peeling paint. The whistle that isn't around his neck right now but lives on him anyway, a phantom weight at the sternum, because he has worn it so many summers his skin expects it even off duty. A kid he pulled out past the buoy line in July, coughing, fine, forgotten by everyone but him. The girl at the snack shack who he almost asked out twice and didn't, both times, for no reason he could explain even to himself.

His body underneath all of it: twenty-nine, easy in a way the wrestling coach's never was, the shoulders and forearms built by water instead of a gym, no old injuries filed away, no complaints. Bald head still faintly sun-warm at the crown from a day that, by every clock this kitchen keeps, should not have ended yet — a graveyard shift, maybe, a swap with another guard, some reason his evening runs backward against the mountains outside. Freckles scattered like something spilled across the bridge of his nose, which you notice only because your eyes drop to the window glass and catch the reflection and don't recognize it, not yet, not really. The hand that isn't holding the fork wants, without being told to, to click something between two fingers — a pen he isn't holding, an old tic with nothing to attach to right now, so it just flexes, empty, against the counter edge.

You look down at that hand. Turn it over. Freckled knuckles, whistle-callus low on two fingers you didn't ask for, no ring, no mark that means anything to anyone but him, and he isn't anyone anymore. You lift your eyes off it, into the dark window where his reflection is waiting like it's been there the whole time.

"Guess I'm not finishing my shift tomorrow," you say, to no one, to the glass, to the mountains you can't see behind it.