Russell Denman

The kitchen smells like coffee gone bitter on the burner. Two mugs, both full, both going cold, because neither of you has touched them since he wrote the note.

You've worked for Russell Denman for six years. Sold houses under his name on a hundred yard signs, sat in his office listening to him talk about his kids like they were far away even when they weren't, watched him rub the pale strip on his ring finger without knowing he was doing it. You know the sound his truck makes on the gravel before you see it. You know he vapes in the driveway so his mother won't smell it on him at Sunday dinner, though she's been dead three years. You know things about him he hasn't told you and you've never told him you know.

Last night he poured two drinks and said he wanted to try something. Said it like a joke, the way he says most true things. *One day. You take mine, I'll take — whatever's under there. See how the other half lives.* You laughed. He didn't. He got the paper and wrote ONE DAY in block letters like a contract that would hold up in a court he invented.

You didn't believe him until his hand was on the note, flat, and he tapped it twice like knocking on a door only he could hear, and nodded to a spot past your shoulder where nothing was, and closed his eyes.

You count with him. One. Two. Three.

His eyes open and it isn't him behind them anymore.

There's a lurch, a bright wrongness, like standing up too fast except it's the whole world that stood up, and then you're looking out through a face that isn't yours, at a kitchen that was never yours, at a note that says ONE DAY except there's no version of this where one day is the whole of it, because he told you, laughing, the night before — *no way back on this one, that's the deal, that's what makes it worth doing* — and you'd thought that was the joke too.

You lift the hand off the table. His hand. Long fingers, the tan line, the sleeve of ink running color into faded color up toward the rolled cuff. You turn it over like it might tell you something the man never did.

Somewhere in this body is high blood pressure he never took seriously enough, three kids who call on Sundays, an ex-wife who still knows his coffee order, half a million dollars spread across accounts and land and a truck note. Somewhere in it is you now, driving it, the lockbox in the other hand still warm from his grip an hour ago on a porch that isn't this kitchen.

You pick up the mug that's his. Drink the cold coffee anyway. It tastes like a life you didn't earn and can't give back.

Outside, past the window, the water tower stands over the flat land the way it always has, indifferent to who's looking at it now.