Shane Gallagher

You are standing in a kitchen in the high desert, and the light through the window over the sink is still the color of dishwater. Early. The coffee maker ticks. Nobody on this street is up. You are Brent Kowalski, five-seven, all shoulder and thigh, and your skull is shaved so smooth that the cold air from the vent registers on it like a hand. Your cheeks ache from the dimples, which don't stop even when you aren't smiling. You have been him for less than a minute.

It's the quiet that sent you back. You had expected a man like this to be loud inside, and he isn't. He is a calendar of quotas and a phone that hasn't buzzed yet, and you stood here with his mug and understood that you could do his Tuesday in your sleep. You don't want a body that works. You want one that is surprising.

So you open the page, and the wheel is already turning.

Then you are standing up straight in a different room, and the noise is enormous.

Your arms are out in front of you, wide apart, and something is running through your hands. A ribbon of white plastic, warm, slick, pulling hard toward the spool on your right. Your weight sits on the balls of your feet. Your breath is half held. A man's body has been in the middle of a motion and you are now the one finishing it, and for half a second you do it wrong. The ribbon skips and you correct, slow, thumb and finger pinching the edge. Then you do it again, correctly, and ten more times, checking each one. The line hums back into its rhythm like nothing happened.

Six feet of him. Long legs, and the knees feel good, a young man's knees. The back is tight across the shoulder blades, a slow ache from hours of leaning. Light comes through tall dirty windows to your left. Beyond the glass is a brick block, a white doorway, three marble steps. Orange foam plugs swing against your chest on their cords.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Navy cotton, soft from a hundred washes, the sleeves rolled twice. The cuff against your forearm, and you are standing in a narrow bedroom with the blinds still down, rolling that same cuff while a man in the bed behind you says *you're gonna be late* in a voice thick with sleep, and you feel it in your chest, a warm, stupid, steady thing. Dan. His name is Dan. You button the shirt from the bottom, because you always do, because Gran used to say a man starts from the ground up.

The plastic slides over your calluses. Memory: a church basement, folding chairs, a coffee urn, a pastor's hand on your shoulder and the sentence *we love you anyway*. You were nineteen. The anyway sat in you for years like a stone in a boot. The shame is not yours, and it still makes your jaw clench.

Your pocket holds a vape. Your thumb finds it without asking. A flash: the back step behind the shop, a sweet blue-raspberry cloud, a promise never to drink, a father's whiskey, a kitchen floor. Never. You are twenty-seven and have never.

The glove tucked at your hip. Under your boots, the old gritty concrete, and a name rising up through the soles: Michael. The one who got away. A Phillies game, a porch, a fight you lost by saying nothing. He still sits somewhere in your ribs, quietly, like a coin in a drawer.

Then one last thing from the cloth at your collar: a savings app, a number that took four years to build, and what you wanted it for. It was a ring. You never told anyone.

You let go of the ribbon with one hand. It keeps spooling anyway.

You turn the hand over. Freckled, rough at the base of the fingers, a thin string of knots around the wrist. It's warm, and it is yours.

You look up, into whoever is looking.

"Well," you say, softly, "hello, Shane."

The line keeps humming. Somewhere a man in the desert is cooling in a kitchen, and you wonder how long this one will last, whether the wanting will come back by lunch, whether you will still be him tomorrow.