Terrell Bishop

The site loaded slow on a connection that never got better, and you sat there in the blue light doing the thing you always do, which is want. Monday, nothing on, the day already spent doomscrolling through other people's lives, and this was just one more tab until it wasn't. A wheel. Plain as that. You'd read about it in threads that always dead-ended into nothing you could buy — always a story, a movie, a thing that happened to someone else in fiction. This was a payment field. You put in the number without letting yourself think about it too hard, because thinking about it too hard was how you'd talked yourself out of every strange door for years, and you were tired of standing in front of doors. You spun.

There is no transition you can describe because there isn't one. One second is the chair, the glow, the small dumb thrill of the wheel still spinning on the screen behind you — and the next you are upright, weight settled through two feet that are not shaped like any feet you've stood in, because you've never stood in feet, and the air has gone flat and still around you like a held breath. Cool. Charged. Smells of rain that hasn't hit yet and dust that's already moving. A screen door somewhere behind you bangs once, hard, and goes quiet. You are walking. You did not decide to walk. His legs are already carrying you off a step, onto packed dirt, chin already tipped up toward a sky that is doing something enormous and green-black and close.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — a navy V-neck, soft from washing, snug at the chest in a way that means he still fills a shirt at forty-eight, still works for a living with his back and his shoulders and not behind a desk. Under it, skin over muscle that knows what a ten-hour shift feels like in the lower back by hour eight. A tightness there now, familiar to him, unremarked-on by him, the kind of ache a man his age has stopped calling pain. The cleft in his chin you can't see but you can feel, somehow, the way your face sits, an old permanent feature your fingers already seem to know is there without checking.

Denim against your legs, dark jeans worn soft at the thigh, and that's a whole morning arriving at once: him pulling them on standing on one foot by the bed, the trailer's window throwing hard blue morning light across the floor, sagebrush outside gone silver with frost that would burn off by nine. His wife's voice from the kitchen, not words, just the shape of a Monday between two people who've had a lot of them. Boots by the door, steel-toe, laces double-knotted because he learned that the hard way once on a loading dock in his twenties. His hands tie them without him watching them do it.

The ring is next — plain gold, warm from his own skin — and it opens a wedding fifteen years back, an outdoor thing, her sister crying more than she did, him sweating through a rented jacket and not caring. Twenty-some years married if you count from before the ring, and under that, quieter, an ex-girlfriend's name surfacing like it does sometimes for no reason at all — Denise — not guilt exactly, just a door in a hallway he doesn't open, doesn't need to, just knows is there. And under both of those, brighter than either: a daughter. Seventeen now. A voicemail he still hasn't deleted from when she was nine, singing badly on purpose to make him laugh.

Your jaw is working — his jaw, gum going at the same slow patient rhythm it goes at all day at the warehouse, aisle after aisle, forklift beeping somewhere out of sight, scanner strapped to his wrist like a second pulse. His hands know that scanner's weight without you telling them anything. They know a hundred things you didn't ask for: how to lift with the knees automatically now, muscle memory older than thought; the particular grip that keeps a case from sliding; the small nod he gives night-shift guys crossing paths at the time clock.

The tattoo on his chest, hidden under cotton, is a face — his father's, done from an old photograph the year the man died, the artist getting the eyes wrong at first and Terrell making him fix it, because the eyes were the whole point.

None of this took longer than the wind holding still. The storm is already exhaling again above the field, the first cold gust finding you, and you are standing where the porch used to keep him.

You look down. His hands, broad, scarred faintly across two knuckles from a warehouse strap years back, gum going still in his mouth now because you've stopped chewing without meaning to. You turn one hand over slow in the graying light like you're checking it's real.

You lift your eyes into the coming rain and say, out loud, to no one standing there, "Well — here we go."