Russell Kowalik

The tab has been open for three days. You keep closing the laptop and opening it again, like checking a wound. vessel.cards. A wheel rendered in flat gray light, a button that says SPIN, a price that felt insane until it didn't. You have wanted this since before you could name the wanting — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every thread at two in the morning where people argue about whether it would feel like falling or like nothing at all. Tonight is nothing. Tonight is the kind of dead Saturday where the wanting gets loud enough to spend money on. You enter the card. You spin. The wheel does what wheels do, and then it isn't spinning anymore, and there is no ceremony to it, no countdown — just a small tilt in the room you're in, except you were never in a room.

You are on a sidewalk. Warm concrete under boots that are not yours yet in any way that matters. A dog's ears go back, watching you the way dogs watch a change of driver. The leash is slack in a hand at the end of an arm heavier than any arm you have ever had, and that hand — thick-knuckled, sun-spotted, a toothpick tucked without thought into the corner of a mouth you didn't ask for — winds the leash twice, decisively, and starts walking before you've caught up to the decision. The dog scrambles to match a stride it has to relearn on the spot.

It is the middle of the night where you spun from. Here the light is long and gold and low, hedges deep green, a Saturday evening in El Paso settling into itself. You understand, distantly, that this is not the same hour, and you let it sit there unexplained, because there is a whole body arriving around you and it wants your attention more than the clock does.

The shirt is what starts it — collar loose at the throat, short sleeves against forearms gone leathery with thirty years of sun, and it comes back to you sleeve by sleeve, in his hands: this morning, buttoning it one-handed in a bathroom with a cracked mirror, the fabric already soft and thinned at the elbows from washing, a smell of fabric softener and something else underneath it, WD-40 maybe, that never quite comes out. Russell put this shirt on without looking, the way a man dresses when dressing isn't a decision anymore. Boots next — the memory arrives through the soles, the particular ache of standing all day on a moving truck's ramp, a lifetime of couches and dressers and a upright piano once that took four men and a church prayer group's worth of profanity to get down a narrow staircase in Sunset Heights.

The scar through the eyebrow comes with a flash that isn't gentle: a warehouse dock, a strap that snapped, the edge of a headboard. He was twenty-six. He didn't go to the ER because the job paid by the piece and he needed the piece. That's Russell in one memory — pain absorbed like a cost of doing business, the same way his back absorbs it now, low and constant, a dull wire strung across his lower spine that never fully goes quiet, that he's stopped mentioning to anyone because nobody wants to hear a fifty-year-old man complain about his back.

The leash gives you Marisol. Not directly — through the vinyl handle, worn smooth where his palm has gripped it a thousand evenings — you get her laugh first, sharp and easy, then the fight in the parking lot of a Rosa's Cantina six months back, then nothing, just the shape of her missing from the walks now, how he still says "we" about the dog sometimes and catches himself. She left the dog. She didn't want it to be a thing between them, she said, like leaving a dog wasn't already the thing. He has a toothpick going now out of old habit, the wood gone soft at one end, and the taste of it is a Friday night taste, a two-beers-and-a-Marlboro taste, though tonight there's been neither.

Under all of it, the house comes through his feet before it's even in view — turquoise paint blistering on a flat roof, chain-link warm to the touch even at dusk, a yard of hard-packed dirt he's meant to do something with for years. Church on Sunday mornings when the shoulder isn't screaming, a Bible with a cracked spine on the nightstand, faith worn the way the boots are worn — present, functional, not examined much. Twenty-four years of couches shouldered up staircases, of tailgates slammed at six a.m., of a body that works because it has to and complains in a language only he speaks fluently now — the right hip, the left shoulder, the lower back that the mattress never quite forgives.

The dog tugs. You feel Russell's hand answer before you tell it to — an old, worn communication between a man and a leash — and something in you, something that is not him at all, notices the size of these hands, the weight hanging off this frame, the way breath moves differently through a chest this wide.

You stop. You lift the hand off the leash and hold it up in the gold light, turning it, the calluses catching the sun along the creases.

You say, out loud, to no one, to the hedge, to the dog watching you with its head cocked: "Whose hands are these."

The dog barks once, short, like an answer it doesn't have.

You look up from the hand and into whatever is watching — a window across the street, a phone left recording on a porch rail, the world itself — and you hold there, because somewhere behind you a wheel is still warm, and you don't know yet if tonight is the only night you get him, or the first of many, and neither does he, and neither does anyone.