Todd Marchibroda

The mower is still running when you let go of it.

You are standing in a body that smells like cut grass and diesel, gray hair stuck to your forehead under the ballcap, and your knees — his knees, forty-three years of them — ache in the particular way they ache every day at this hour, which is the reason you are letting go of the handle at all. Not pain exactly. Just the awareness that this is the four thousandth time this body has walked this same acre of cemetery lawn in Western Kansas, under this same flat noon light, and something in you that isn't him has started keeping count. You have been him less than a minute, the story says, but you have also been him long enough. Eighteen men before him. You don't remember all their faces anymore. You remember the wanting, which is its own animal and does not go away just because it was fed yesterday.

The mower idles. You walk inside, past the cracked kitchen window, sit down at the laptop already open on the table because some part of him — of you, now — never quite closes it. The wheel is right there where you left it, a plain gray card with a plainer name: vessel.cards. You pay. You spin.

There is no drumroll you can feel. There is only the middle of a Monday in one place becoming the middle of a Monday in another, four states and one hour east, and a man named Todd Marchibroda reaching up to button a shirt he has already buttoned wrong once.

His hand is flat against his own sternum when you arrive, and the first thing you know is ribs — a stranger's ribs, warm, rising and falling on their own without you asking them to, faster than yours had been. You feel the wrongness of the buttons before you understand what buttons are, undo three of them by feel, do them up again straight, the way his hands would have if his hands had been thinking. The tie is already around the collar, unknotted, and you knot it without deciding to — a four-in-hand, plain, nothing like the double Windsor his fingers seem to want to fall into out of habit. You stop halfway through and let the habit win. It comes out crooked. It comes out his.

The room arrives a half-second behind the body: lamp on, low, a suitcase gaping open on an unmade bed, a water glass gone warm on the nightstand. Bootlaces still loose on the floor where he — you — left them ten minutes and a lifetime ago in another timeline that this one has already replaced.

The shirt gives you the first flash: this exact shirt, this exact morning, him standing in front of a different mirror in a rental with the water running, thinking about a walkthrough at nine, a punch list he hasn't finished, a subcontractor who no-showed Friday and hasn't answered a text since. Nashville light through a motel curtain the color of weak tea. He does this a lot — travels for framing work when the local jobs dry up, sleeps in places like this, tells himself it's temporary and has been telling himself that for six years.

The studs in his ears give you nothing dramatic — just a Tuesday, twenty years back, a dare from a girlfriend whose name doesn't survive the memory, the sting of it, laughing anyway.

His hands, when you look down through his eyes at them, are wide and marked — a white seam of scar tissue across one knuckle he doesn't remember earning, calluses stacked on calluses at the base of each finger, a permanent gray under the nails no amount of scrubbing gets out. They ache. Not sharply. A low structural ache that starts in the lower back and travels up through the shoulders, present so long he's stopped calling it pain and started calling it Tuesday, Wednesday, every day that ends in y. He is forty-two. His body has been forty-two for a while in the way that framing work ages a man early, joint by joint, one nail gun kickback and one bad ladder catch at a time.

The belt loop under your thumb gives you a wedding that didn't happen — a woman named Denise, four years, an engagement ring he still has in a truck console somewhere because neither of them ever said the word breakup, just stopped calling. No kids. He'd wanted one, quietly, never said so.

The nightstand under your palm, cool laminate, gives you the drinking — not now, not in years, but the shape of where it used to sit in his week, Friday nights specifically, and how he still reaches for a cigarette on the rare nights he does drink, like the two things were stitched together somewhere back before he can date it and never came apart even after the drinking left.

His fingers, still on the last button, want to drum against his chest — an old, unthinking tic, the rhythm of a man waiting on something, a truck, a callback, a life to start being different than it is. You let them.

You look at your hands. They are not gray-haired hands anymore. They are broad and callused and forty-two years old and they are drumming, once, twice, against a shirt buttoned correctly for the first time this morning, and you lift your eyes off them into the mirror across the unmade bed, into the low lamp light, and you say, to no one, in a voice that has never used this register before —

"Wrong knot. Don't care."

The mower back in Kansas is still running, no one left to hear it.