Tanner Voss

You are standing in a stockroom at the back of a store that is not yours, in a body that is not yours, and your knees hurt. It is the middle of the night. Everyone in this town is asleep, and you came in to count the cold-case inventory because you could not lie in the dark beside a woman breathing. The man you are wearing is forty-three. He has a belly that sits on his belt like a hand resting there, a gray beard that itches under the jaw, and green eyes that go blurry when he reads small print. You have been him for less than a minute. Already you know what he cannot do. He cannot stop thinking about the number he is worth, and you cannot stand the sound of it. You wanted a man who is still going somewhere. You put the box cutter down. The page is already open on the little screen, with the wheel on it, and you pay.

The kitchen is dark. A stool is under you, and the counter edge is against your forearm. Your thumb is on glass, and the glass is warm and lit with watches, each one priced beyond a month of rent. The scroll stops on a number. Your thumb lifts and stays lifted. You turn the phone face-down on the counter, and the hand that does it is yours now.

Nothing in the room moves. The refrigerator hums. Dishes are stacked in the rack, and a plate with crumbs on it is pushed to one side.

Then the shirt gives you something, thin cotton gone soft against your back. A morning comes with it: his arms going through the sleeves in the dark before the sun, a girlfriend asleep, her leg thrown across the sheet. He tugged the hem down over his belt line. He was tired already. He is twenty-five and he has been tired since nineteen.

The jeans give you more. The stiff knees, the dried drywall mud on the thigh that cracks when you shift. You remember a job site with a framed-out second floor, sawdust hanging in the sun like flour. A man in a truck saying the number again, what the job would pay, and what it would not. You remember the quote he undercut to win it. You remember doing the math on the tailgate, and the math not working.

Your socks are worn through at the heel, and the floor is cool under them. Your feet remember the stairs of a bungalow porch, two small bodies running up them, a boy and a girl, and what it was to catch one under the arms. Their weight is still in your forearms, a ghost of it. Then a different woman, from years back, standing in a doorway, saying his name flatly. The ex. She still matters to him in a way he never said aloud. He still drives past a street.

Your jaw is clenched. You find this out because it aches, and it has been clenched the whole time. When you let it go, a tooth clicks. This is what his body does when he is not thinking. It braces.

The body is strong. It is five-seven, compact, and the shoulders are loaded with years of lifting sheet goods. The palms are ridged with calluses, hard across the base of the fingers where a hammer lives. Your lower back has a low, steady complaint. Your stubble rasps against your knuckle when you touch your chin. At the front of your hair, when you push it back, you feel the white streak only as a texture, a coarse lock among the soft ones.

You pick up your hand from the counter and turn it over. It is scarred with work and not with anything else. You look up at the dark window, where a face looks back with pale eyes.

"Okay," you say. His voice comes out low and a little hoarse. "Okay. Let's see what you were scared of."

The wanting is quiet right now. You do not know how long it stays that way, or whether you will be him by morning.