Todd Farriday

The gym is empty at this hour except for the sound your own shoes make on the hardwood, and you are standing there in Rayaan Sethi's body, twenty-two years old, dribbling a ball you don't need, because sixteen minutes of being fast and hazel-eyed and worshipped by a whole small Texas town has already gone thin on you. It's Friday, end of practice, end of the week, the kind of light that makes a man believe he should want to stay somewhere. You don't. You already know the trouble with a good body is that it teaches you nothing, gives you nothing to open — this one's memories arrived stingy, a childhood of drills and a mother's voice from the bleachers, nothing you wanted to sit inside. Sixteen minutes was long enough to know it. You take out the phone that isn't yours, in a hand that isn't yours, and you open the site anyway, the wheel already spinning behind your eyes before your thumb even finds the button.

Somewhere else, later than here, a controller is warm in two hands, and a counter on a dark screen ticks down to zero.

The character stands. The thumbs move a half-beat behind it, clumsy with a memory you don't have yet, and the man on screen takes a bullet meant for someone paying attention. You set the controller down still glowing. You sit back into a body that is thicker through the middle than the one you left, shorter, older, the couch cushion giving under a weight you haven't earned. Your scalp prickles where hair used to be thick and isn't anymore. Somewhere behind your ribs, a heartbeat that has done this forty-seven years without asking permission keeps doing it.

The shirt is what opens first — a soft gray tee, worn through at the collar, and touching it puts you in a bedroom this morning, gray light through blinds, a woman still half asleep saying something about picking up Ellie from swim practice, and his hands — Todd's hands, the name arriving with the memory like a tag on a coat — pulling the shirt over his head one-armed the way he's done ten thousand mornings, quick, unthinking, the ring catching for a second on the collar like it always does. Under it: a chest that carries fifty push-ups every other day and doesn't love him for it anymore, a low ache between the shoulder blades that's been there two years and that he's decided, the way men his age decide things, not to mention to anyone.

The sweatpants next — an elastic waist grown a little more forgiving than the ones from ten years back, and in them a whole autumn: him at a barbecue in the backyard of the house in Westchester, the one with the mango tree that drops fruit nobody picks up, his oldest boy home from college for one weekend and Todd standing at the grill not really cooking, just holding the tongs, listening to the boy talk about a girl he's not going to marry and being glad, quietly, gratefully glad, that this is still his to listen to.

The wedding band is next, plain, gold gone a little dull, and it gives you fastest and hardest of anything: a chapel outside Provo twenty years ago, Karen in white, his own hands shaking so bad the bishop had to help him get the ring past her knuckle, and the two of them laughing about it after, in the car, still in their wedding clothes, nothing bad having happened to them yet. Then, folded right behind that one, uninvited: a woman named Sarah from before Karen, from college, a version of himself that almost went a different way, a name he still can't hear without something catching low in his chest, though he has never told Karen that and never will. It isn't guilt exactly. It's just a room in him with the door shut, and you've walked into it anyway because that's what the ring does.

The recliner under him is the job — sawdust smell baked into the fabric no washing gets out, and through it, whole years: him at twenty-six with a nail gun and a boss who didn't think he'd last, him at thirty-five signing the papers on his own company, him last Tuesday walking a framed-out kitchen with a client who wanted the island six inches bigger and Todd saying sure, no problem, already doing the math on the load-bearing wall in his head. His hands know stud spacing the way some men know scripture. He has, in fact, both.

His thumbnail finds his other thumb, unbidden, a habit older than the marriage, older than the company, older probably than he remembers starting — some nervous boy's fidget he never outgrew, biting down at the cuticle of his left thumb while somewhere on the screen his character dies again for the second time tonight, unremarked, unimportant.

You look down at the hand doing it. Forty-seven years old, a thin gold band, a nail bitten to nothing. You turn it over slow, like it might explain itself from the other side.

Then you look up into the dark room, the TV throwing blue light across your face, and you say, to no one, in his voice, "Whose turn is it."