Shane Kowalczyk

Marcus Alistair Denny's dorm room is quiet the way Sunday afternoons in Phoenix always are, sun coming through the blinds in flat gold bars across a desk you haven't used for anything but this. Five days in him and you already know the shape of his boredom — the moustache he keeps touching like it belongs to someone else, the freckled forearms, the econ textbook he will never open. It isn't even that he's unpleasant to wear. It's that nothing in him is *yours*, and never will be, and you've learned the difference between a body you're killing time in and one you actually want. Eighty-seven men taught you that difference. This is just the eighty-eighth time you've acted on it. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, spinning lazily on the screen like it's been waiting. You don't think about why today. You never really do. You just feel the itch, same as always, and you pay, and you spin.

The wheel lands.

You are turned slightly away from a stove, a wooden spoon in your hand, mid-stir, and the stir does not stop — it reverses, your wrist carrying it the other way without your permission, without your noticing until it's already done. Steam off a pan. A light over the stove throwing yellow onto tile. Your feet are bare and the floor is cold in a way that feels old, familiar to someone, though not yet to you. There's salt in your other hand. You tip it into the pan without tasting, and your arm — thick through the forearm, a workingman's arm, nicked and sun-browned to the wrist and pale above it — reaches up into a cabinet and comes down with a second plate, white with a blue ring around the rim, and sets it down next to the first one already on the counter, like you were always going to need it.

The spoon is what opens first. It's maple, worn smooth at the neck where a thumb rides it, and the thumb riding it now is yours but the groove was worn by years of somebody else, and that somebody comes up through the wood into you — Shane, fourteen years old, standing on a stepstool stirring applesauce for his mother because she'd hurt her wrist, proud of being trusted with the stove. The shirt against your back does more: a plain gray tee, soft from a hundred washes, and under it the memory of this morning, his own hands pulling it on after the flannel, after showering off a full day of framing, the particular ache between his shoulder blades from holding a nail gun hose up and out of the way all afternoon, the specific satisfaction of a wall gone up straight on a slab that was level because he'd checked it three times himself. He is eighteen. He has been doing this work since he was sixteen and his body already knows things about weight and leverage that boys twice his age on a crew still have to think about — how to carry a stud without it finding your shin, how to seat a nail with the gun held just so, the quiet competence of hands that have learned a trade with the muscle instead of the mind.

The counter under your palm gives you the apartment — small, rented, half his, one bedroom he painted himself a color his last landlord hated. And the second plate, the one you just set down without deciding to, pulls hardest of all: her name was Danielle, and for eight months this counter had two plates on it every night without him having to think about it, her laugh from the next room, the two of them bad at cooking together and doing it anyway. She left in March. It is almost enough on its own account that his hands still don't know how to cook for one — that the body keeps setting the table for someone who isn't coming, an old loop his mind hasn't caught up to yet, embarrassing him a little every time he catches himself doing it, like now. His bank app, if you reached for his phone, would tell you the rest in colder numbers — a truck loan he's underwater on, a card he's been riding since the breakup, a hole he doesn't look at the bottom of. His hands, when they're empty and his mind drifts, go to his mouth; his nails are bitten down past where they should be, a tell he's had since before any of this, since before Danielle, since the stepstool and the applesauce.

You look down at those hands now — the salt still faintly ghosting your fingertips, the spoon resting against the pan's lip, dark hair fallen forward over your brow the way it does, the same hands that just put down a plate meant for no one. You turn one over slowly, studying the half-moons bitten off the thumbnail, the rope-burn callus at the base of the first finger, sixteen years younger than the one you left behind in Phoenix and worth less on paper than you've ever been in your life, and somehow none of that matters at all right now.

"Guess it's just me again," you say out loud, to the empty kitchen, in his voice, and you don't yet know if you mean tonight, or for good.