Terrence Odum

The dentist's office is closed and dark except for the little lamp over the model teeth on his desk, and you are sitting in his chair in his body feeling nothing, which is the whole problem. Thirty-five years old, good shoulders under the polo shirt, a hygienist named Priya downstairs who likes you, a condo with a soaking tub, four hundred and thirty-five men folded up behind your eyes like a stack of coats in a closet that never fills. None of it is bad. That's the trouble with it. You spin for the drop, for the half-second where you don't know what you're about to be, and tonight this body's competence is a kind of ceiling — you know exactly what tomorrow in it tastes like, because you already lived a version of it in somebody else. You open the site on the desktop, the wheel already spinning before you've decided anything, the way it always is by the time you admit you're doing it.

You are bent over a splicer with a blade the size of a fingernail, and your fingers, without asking you, stop.

Not fully. A quarter-inch of film hangs slack between your left hand and the block, and for the length of one breath the two hands don't agree on what happens next — one wants to press the cut, one has just now noticed it is a hand. Halfway through the motion you correct, slow, deliberate, like a man double-checking work he could do in his sleep, because for one instant he could not. The projector behind you keeps running. Its beam goes on out through the port over your shoulder, throwing a rectangle of gray light and dust across a nearly empty house, and none of that stops for what is happening to you.

The flannel is what gets you first — worn soft at the elbows, warm from your own body heat, and it comes with the morning it went on: eleven at night, actually, pulling it off a hook by the door of a house gone quiet, kids long asleep down the hall, Denise's key already in the lock of her own late shift across town so you didn't have to say goodbye twice. You do the four-to-midnight most weeks now. Ted at the multiplex two towns over needed somebody who could run both houses and didn't mind the hours, and the diner on Main closed eight years back so there isn't much reason for this town to be awake past nine anyway, except the movies, except you, standing up here in the dark keeping the light going out through that little window like it still matters, and it does, to you, though you couldn't say exactly why anymore.

The splicer under your fingers has its own memory, worn into your palm — the particular give of this exact blade, dulled just enough that you compensate half a pound harder than a new one needs, ten thousand cuts of muscle memory sitting in the tendons of this hand like sediment. You learned this trade at twenty-two from a man named Sal who's been dead eleven years, and you have outlasted three different theater owners and one changeover to digital that didn't stick because this house is too old and too broke to afford the upgrade, so they kept you, the one man in the county who still knows how to build a reel by hand, and there is a stupid pride in that, in being the last one who can.

The reel canister under your other arm carries a whole Sunday — hauling it up the fire stairs, Priya's laugh, no, not Priya, that's the other body, that's not this life — here it's Marlene from three doors down waving at you from her porch as you carry cans in from the truck, and your youngest, Dontae, fourteen now, riding along in the truck bed even though you tell him every single time not to. Your daughter's in her first year at Kent State studying something with numbers you don't fully understand and are prouder of than you know how to say out loud, and you call her every Sunday from this booth on your break because the signal's better up here than anywhere in the house.

Denise. Six years now, since the divorce cleared and healed over. She brings you coffee some nights when her shift lines up, sits on the stool by the rewind bench and doesn't talk, just lets you work, and that quiet is the best part of most weeks. You quit drinking somewhere around year two of this job, just drifted off it the way a tide goes out, no ceremony, no meeting, just noticing one month you hadn't wanted one. Never smoked. Your chest doesn't need one more thing fighting it — the CPAP mask waits folded in your coat pocket right now, packed for later, because sleep has been a machine-assisted thing for years and you've made peace with the hiss of it.

Your leg is already going, foot tapping against the booth floor in the rhythm it keeps whether you're nervous or not, whether anything is even wrong. Fifty years in this build — heavy through the middle, strong through the forearms in that specific projectionist way, low ache set permanently into both knees from decades on concrete floors, hair you touch up yourself in the bathroom mirror every few weeks because gray at fifty feels like giving something up you're not ready to give up, though it's coming in anyway at the roots and the temples no matter what you do about the rest of it.

You look down at the hand still holding the cut film, turn it over slow — his hand, thick-knuckled, a little burn scar's worth of old shine near the thumb that isn't a scar, just wear, just work — and up through the port the beam is still running clean and steady into an empty house.

"Okay," you say to no one, to the dust in the light. "Let's finish the show."

Under it, already, the wheel keeps turning somewhere behind your eyes, a page you haven't closed.