Shane Ostrander

Colin Havrilla's office chair is cheap and it creaks when you shift your weight in it, and you have been Colin Havrilla for five minutes, which is not long enough to know if the ache behind his left eye is a Colin thing or a today thing. Anchorage light is doing the long gold thing it does at this hour, coming sideways through the blinds of an apartment that smells like someone else's cologne, and you are looking at his hands — big, freckled, a paralegal's hands, a half-healed hangnail on the thumb — and you already know you are not going to keep them. It isn't boredom exactly. It's that five minutes was enough to feel the specific shape of this life waiting to close around you, deadlines and a landlord and a body that runs warm, and 863 times in you have learned to recognize the feeling of a life introducing itself. You open the laptop still on his desk. The site loads the way it always loads, patient, unbothered, a wheel and a button and no explanation because none is needed anymore. You spin before you can decide not to.

The leash goes slack in your hand.

You are standing on a sidewalk in a heat that has not broken even though the sun is long gone, the air thick enough to chew, a streetlamp throwing orange over a hedge and a dog with its front paws planted, sniffing at something with total commitment. Your hand — this hand, thicker through the palm than the one you just had, a mole riding high on your cheek you can feel like a pressure point when you frown — has stopped reeling the leash out. The dog's ears go back. It looks up at you like it already knows before you do. You wind the leash twice, quick, a motion your arm does without asking your permission, and you start walking, and the dog has to trot to catch the pace.

The jacket is a green canvas thing, sherpa-collared, worn soft at the cuffs, and the second your arms feel its weight the morning comes back whole: standing in a bedroom with the ceiling fan going, pulling this exact jacket off a hook by the door because the AC in the house never quite wins against the Georgia heat and dawn walks run cool for maybe forty minutes before the day remembers itself. Shane. The name arrives the way they always do, sideways, attached to nothing and then attached to everything. Shane Ostrander, who put this jacket on with a coffee mug still in his other hand, who left the mug on the kitchen counter next to a stack of plates he was going to get to, who stepped over a small sneaker and a smaller one by the door without looking down because he steps over them forty times a day.

The tattoo on your forearm is warm from the jacket sleeve riding up, script letters and a date, and touching your own skin to it — thumb dragging absently over the ink the way you do, the way Shane does, not thinking about it — brings the delivery room back in full: fluorescent and too bright, a sound that undid something in his chest permanently, a name he picked because his girlfriend cried when he said it out loud the first time and he decided right then it would live on his arm forever. Two years old now, or close to it. Feet by the door in the size that still surprises him every time he picks up the shoes.

The leash handle is worn smooth in a groove his palm already knows, molded to how he grips things, and it gives him — gives you — the year before this one: a woman before Shane's girlfriend, an ex who still texts sometimes about nothing, whose laugh he can still hear clearer than her face some nights, who left before the good years started and who he thinks about exactly as often as he lets himself, which is more than he'd admit. The girlfriend now is easier and harder in different rooms of the house. The dishes stacked this morning were his. The backpack by the door, small and blue with a fraying zipper, was packed by him too, and some second-nature part of Shane's hands is already annoyed at himself for forgetting the dog's poop bags, checking a jacket pocket that isn't there.

His legs are shorter than the ones you just had, sturdier, a little soft at the middle from a life spent standing in kitchens instead of gyms, and there's a restlessness low in them, banked, the ghost of a bounce his knee does at the table when the kid won't eat and the coffee's gone cold. His jaw itches under two inches of beard he trims but never shaves, an itch his hand doesn't move to scratch because right now his hand is full of dog. Somewhere in his chest is the particular boredom-that-isn't-boredom of a man who loves his life and sometimes stands very still inside it, waiting to feel like more than the errands that make it up. Nicotine wants a hit he isn't going to give it standing here. He never once, in twenty-seven years, wanted a drink, and that steadiness sits in you like borrowed furniture, someone else's peace.

You look down at the hand holding the leash — his hand, blunt-fingered, a callus riding the base of the thumb from a leash reel that sticks — and turn it over slow in the orange light, like it might answer to you if you asked it something.

The dog looks up, waiting for the next step.

"Okay," you say, to nobody, to him, to the hedge, "let's go home," and you don't know yet if that's true, or for how long, or whose home it's going to be by the time you get there.