Todd Kessling

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The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to sit with what you're about to do. A wheel, hand-drawn looking, with names you can't read yet crowded around the rim. Sunday, early afternoon, nothing on. You have wanted this since you were a kid watching a movie where two people swap bodies and thinking about it too hard, too long, in a way that never really left. You have read the threads at two in the morning. You have never once thought it would work. You put the card number in like it's a joke you're playing on yourself, and you press spin, and the wheel does what wheels do, and it does not feel like anything until it stops.

Then it is not a screen anymore. It is dark, and warm, and there is a mattress under a hip that isn't yours yet, and an arm is hanging off the edge of a bed into cooler air, and lungs that were dragging air in rough and slow go smooth in the space of one breath. The arm draws itself up. The body you are wearing rolls onto its back without being asked to, hands coming to rest folded on the chest, and somewhere in the part of you that used to be a person at a screen you understand: he has never once slept like this. You have already changed something before you've done anything at all.

The room smells like fabric softener and someone else's cigarettes from years ago that never quite left the drywall, and a dog somewhere outside, and diesel two counties over. A T-shirt is against your back, cotton gone soft with age, and that's the first door: a flash of a laundromat, quarters, a woman's laugh you don't have a name for yet, and then more, a year of it — Denise, doing the wash on Tuesdays because that's when the machines are free, folding this exact shirt into a stack while a radio plays something with a fiddle in it. You didn't choose that. It came up through the cotton like heat off asphalt.

The mattress under you gives another flash, older: a different bed, a different woman, a fight about money that was really about something else, the two kids down the hall pretending to be asleep. That was Renee. You know her name now the way you know your own name isn't in this body at all — sideways, through what the sheets remember. She left, or he left, or it was slower than either of those words, and there's a version of him that still calls her sometimes when the second beer turns into the sixth, just to hear her tell him no.

The socks are still on his feet from a shift that ended hours before whatever hour it actually is here, and through them comes cold air off a walk-in cooler, fog rolling out low across a concrete floor, a compressor ticking as it dies, his hands — thick, sure, chapped at the knuckles — running a manifold gauge along a line like he's done it four thousand times, because he has. Refrigeration work at strange hours because a man drinks the way he does and the night shift doesn't ask questions about breath. Forty-two years on this body: a gut that used to be muscle, a knee that clicks going down stairs, a nose that got broken swinging a truck door open into his own face at nineteen and set a little crooked ever since, which he has never once bothered to fix because Whitney — that's the one now, the one whose side of the bed this is — says she likes it, says it makes him look like he's been somewhere.

The inner forearm carries its own small flash just from the air moving over the ink: a shop two towns over, nineteen years old, a friend who is dead now from something stupid and early, geometric lines chosen because they meant nothing and cost less. You feel it the way he'd feel it, which is barely, just a thing that's there.

Under the collarbone, under the ribs, there is the rest of him settling in the way weather settles: two kids who call on Sundays that aren't this one, a mortgage nobody talks about at dinner, money that came easier than it should have from a business he built out of Freon and long nights and being the only guy in three counties who'd come out at 2 a.m. And under all of it, quiet and constant as the compressor cycling somewhere in the walls of this house, a leg that has already started to bounce against the mattress, a small motor running in him that has nothing to do with what he's thinking about, that has never once stopped since before Renee, since before Whitney, since before any of it.

You lift the hand off the chest. Turn it over in the dark, streetlight coming thin through the gap in the curtain, catching the ink on the forearm, the crooked bridge of a nose you can feel more than see. It is a stranger's hand and it is the only hand you have, and somewhere behind these eyes that were his a moment ago there is nothing left of him to mind that you're using it.

"Whitney," you say, low, testing his voice in the dark room, not sure yet if you mean to wake her or just to hear it land in a mouth that isn't yours. Nobody answers. The wheel is still out there, waiting for whenever you decide to spin it again, and there's no telling from in here whether that's tonight or years from now.