Russell Allen Voight

You are Gary Lee Dufrene, and you are standing in his kitchen in Houston with the refrigerator humming. It is nearly midnight. Your feet ache the way a delivery driver's feet ache. The steering-wheel callus on your right palm has gone soft against the laptop. Seven days and fifteen hours in this body, and tonight you opened the cabinet where he keeps the good bourbon and found it already open, already a third gone, and you did not remember doing it. You did not feel the drink. His liver does the remembering for him, or it doesn't. You are tired of a man who does not quite hold still around you. You are tired of the dad bod's slow lean toward the couch. Nobody sent you back. You just stopped wanting to be Gary, the way you stop wanting a coat. Your thumb finds the key. The wheel turns.

Cold, first. Then the fork is in your hand, halfway up, and there is a coat on your shoulders heavy as a wet dog. Noodles and ginger steam in your nose. A paper container sits in your left palm, warm at the bottom. The floor is linoleum, hard and cold through the soles of his brown shoes. The window ahead is black and has a man in it, bearded to the chest.

The fork stops. You hold it there and the kitchen holds still around it.

Then the coat begins to talk. The zipper pull under your chin is cold metal, and your fingers know it before you do. This morning it was colder than this. He stood in a hallway of brick houses and the sky was the color of dishwater. He had put on the navy polo first, the collar he always flips flat with two fingers, and then the khakis, left leg first because the right knee complains. The belt is brown and has a worn hole four holes in. He clipped the badge to it last, the retractable one, the photo in it taken years ago when he still had more hair. He feels a small, private embarrassment about that photo.

The container shifts and your left ring finger finds the pale place where the band used to sit. The skin there is smooth and tight. Memory comes up through it whole. A kitchen, but a different one, yellow, with a girl of six standing on a chair stirring pancake batter and flour on her eyebrows. Three kids' worth of Saturday mornings. A woman at the sink saying his name, not angrily, just tired. His chest tightens with something that is not yours, a grief gone so quiet it feels like furniture. She is the ex-wife. He still sets out two coffee cups some mornings and puts one back.

Your free hand rises without your telling it and runs across the top of his head, over the thin hair and the scalp bare at the crown. The gesture is old and automatic. It comes with a flash of the glass-walled office, the door always open, a spreadsheet, someone's problem becoming his problem. He is good at being the one who stays calm. It is the only thing the job ever asked of him. Under it lies a small number, savings, a few tens of thousands, counted often and never spent. A church pew, hard and varnished. A hymn his knees remember. One drink most nights, sometimes two, at this counter, with the light off.

Your back aches low, where fifty-seven years collect. His shoulders are strong from carrying things for other people. The beard is heavy on your chest and the wool of the coat scratches your wrists. Underneath it all the noodles are good and he has been hungry all day without noticing.

You set the fork down on the counter. You look at your hands, the knuckles broad, the ring-finger skin pale, the wrists thick with gray hair. You turn them over. They are completely yours now, and completely a stranger's. You lift your eyes to the black window and the bearded man looking back.

"Well," you say, in a voice lower than you expected, "hello, Russell."

Behind the words a small hunger is already asking how long this one will last, and whether you will wake up as him.