Terrell Broussard

Warren Sturgill's kitchen smells like something his social worker's salary bought on sale, and you have been him for five minutes, which is long enough to know you don't want the rest of the night in this body. The gray hair. The knees that complain going down the porch steps. The soft gut he calls skinny fat like the honesty helps. He was mid-sentence to himself about a case file when you arrived in him last time, and nothing about him has improved since. Eastern Kentucky at the end of a Thursday, light going long and orange through a window that needs cleaning. You set his phone down on his counter, open the laptop that is still logged into vessel.cards from before, and you don't examine the wanting too closely, because you never do. It's just there, the way it always comes back, some hour after the last one — an itch that isn't about him specifically, isn't about anyone specifically, just the wheel and what it might hand you next. You spin.

The radio is against your collarbone before you are anybody. Then it is your hand holding it there, thumb on the call switch, and you are 5'5" and compact and the strap of a duty belt is heavier on your hips than you expected, heavier than Warren's cardigan ever was. Behind you a patrol car engine ticks as it cools. Ahead of you, a shotgun house the color of wet sand catches the last sun and steam comes up off the street where rain dried an hour ago. Your mouth is halfway through a word into the radio — *show me clear at* — and it comes out wrong, doubled, like a record skipping, and you finish it a half-beat late and too careful. Your thumb goes to the switch again. You key it a second time to be sure you said the address right. You did. You do it again anyway. Ten more small motions come out of you checked, deliberate, a body double-clutching itself on a job that has run itself for a decade without asking permission.

The radio strap is what opens first — worn smooth in one place from ten thousand grips — and it gives you a rookie year, sweat-backed, a training officer named Boudreaux laughing at you for calling in a 10-4 wrong on your third day. Then the belt: the weight of it settling right, muscle memory older than thought, how you learned to stop noticing thirty pounds of gear the same way you stopped noticing your own name. Terrell. It comes with the badge pin at your chest, cool under two fingers when you touch it without deciding to — District Six, ten years in, a promotion he didn't take because taking it meant a desk and he never wanted a desk, he wanted the wet street and the porches and the people who knew his name from the corner store.

The shirt gives you more once your back finds the car's rear panel, the exact lean he takes every dusk on this block, an old habit shaped into his spine. This morning — his morning, hours behind where you're standing now, because his day started while yours in Kentucky was still climbing toward noon — he buttoned this shirt standing in front of a mirror that used to have two toothbrushes at the sink and now has one. Cuffed the sleeves the same fold every day since the academy. Touched the pale stripe on his ring finger without meaning to, the ghost of Denise's ring gone eighteen months, the finger still remembering a weight that isn't there. Two boys somewhere in this city right now doing homework at their mother's table, a Thursday-night phone call to them logged into his personal cell like a recurring appointment he refuses to let himself miss. He quit drinking the year the marriage ended, not because of it exactly, just alongside it, the way you quit a lot of things at once when one big thing goes. Quit cigarettes years before that. His doctor's voice about his blood pressure, a pill bottle by the coffee maker, a joke he makes about it to the other guys at roll call that isn't really a joke.

The porch light across the street clicks on with the dusk sensor and something in him — in you, now, wearing him — eases at it, small, unexamined, a man who likes this street even on the nights it gives him nothing good.

You look down at your hand still on the radio, brown-skinned, a callus at the base of the thumb that isn't yours and is now, and you turn it over once like you're checking it arrived with all its fingers.

"Show me back in service," you say into the radio, and it isn't a report to anyone. It's just a voice you're trying on, out loud, to hear if it's really yours yet.