Terry Wickland

The site loads slow on a Friday that isn't asking anything of you. Nothing on. Nothing to eat that sounds good. You have scrolled through everything the world has to offer twice already and none of it stuck, so you go back, the way you always go back, to the thing you've wanted since before you can remember wanting anything else — not a person, not a place, just the idea of being *someone else*, standing somewhere else, wearing a stranger's weight. You've read the threads at two in the morning for years. You never thought it would be real, and then a friend mentioned a site, half-joking, and you typed the address in like it was nothing, and it was not nothing. vessel.cards. A wheel on a page, and a price, and you paid it before you let yourself think about whether you should.

You spin.

There is no falling, no rushing dark, none of the travel you always imagined it would take. There is just a pan, and a spoon, and your hand — his hand — moving in a circle over heat, and then not moving in that circle anymore, reversing, stirring the other way like the direction itself belonged to someone new. Salt goes into the pan from fingers that know exactly how much without measuring, and you don't taste it, don't even think to, and then those fingers are opening a cabinet and taking down a second plate and setting it beside the first, side by side on the counter, like there might be two people eating tonight instead of one.

You are standing in a kitchen that smells like browning meat and old cabinet wood, in a body five foot nine and thin in the shoulders, silver-gray hair cropped close against your skull, and it is already giving you things before you ask for them.

The flannel against your back is the first door. It opens on a morning — this morning, his morning — buttons done up one-handed while the coffee maker clicked and hissed behind him, a habit forty years deep, top button skipped on purpose because it's never felt right buttoned all the way, not since he was young. The shirt remembers being pulled from a hook by the door, remembers a version of him thinking *she likes this one on me*, a small vain thought, gone as fast as it came, replaced by whether the truck needed gas.

The spoon in your hand is the second door, and it swings wide. Decades of diners, of drive-through coffee at four a.m., of a wife — ex-wife now — who used to cook Sunday dinners he can still taste better than he can taste anything on the actual stove in front of him. The divorce was quiet, almost polite, the kind that leaves two people who still call each other on birthdays. Her name comes up warm and a little sad, not painful, just old, like a bruise that healed crooked. There are two kids in there too, grown now, a phone full of photos he doesn't look at often enough, and something in the chest — not the hands, the chest — that tightens pleasantly at the thought of them, pride worn down soft at the edges by time.

The earring is a small door, barely a door at all — a dare, decades back, taken from a friend at a bar, kept because it turned out to suit him, because the dimples that show even when he isn't smiling make him look like he's always halfway to a joke, and the hoop just adds to it. People trust that face at a busted guardrail on I-70 at two in the morning. People need that face to be kind when their car is dead and their night is ruined, and it is, it always has been, without him trying.

The floor under your feet holds the flatbed, the chains, the particular ache of a lower back that's spent thirty years bent over hitches in weather no one should be out in, blood pressure meds in the cabinet by the sink that he takes most mornings and forgets some, a doctor's voice saying *you should really* and him nodding and not changing much. He quit drinking somewhere in his forties without a program, without a date circled on a calendar, just a slow drift away from it that he's still a little proud of and never mentions. Quit smoking around the same time. Small wins, held close.

There's a woman he's seeing now — newer, easier than the marriage ever was, her laugh already a fond thing in some room of him you've only glimpsed — and there's money behind all of this too, more than the coveralls would tell you, decades of decent pay and plainer living than he needed, sitting quiet in accounts he doesn't talk about at the tow yard.

And there's a friend. You. Or — him, before you were this. Somewhere in the wiring of this body is a friendship worn in like a good glove, poker nights, a bad fishing trip, a hospital waiting room once, years ago, when it mattered. He would call you first if something went wrong tonight. He doesn't know you're already here.

The second plate sits on the counter, waiting on someone who was supposed to come over.

You look down. The hand holding the spoon has a burn scar along one knuckle you didn't put there and can't explain, blunt clean nails, silver hairs on the forearm catching the stove light. You turn it over once, like it might answer something, and the dimples move on your borrowed face without you quite deciding to smile.

"Hey, Ter," you say, out loud, to the empty kitchen, testing the sound of a name that isn't yours yet either — his own name, coming out strange in your mouth — "you're not gonna believe the night I'm having."