Tommy Kessler

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Sunday, late morning, Houston, and you are sitting on the edge of a bunk you have only owned for five minutes, and already it is not enough.

That is the whole shame of it, if you let yourself feel shame anymore, which you mostly don't. You are Casey — you are wearing Casey, twenty-four, red hair, the freckles, the soldier's economy of muscle that does everything without waste — and it should hold you. It held you for exactly the length of time it takes a man to stand in front of a mirror in a barracks room and think, *this one's good, this one I could stay in.* Then the thought curdled, the way it always does. Five minutes is enough for a body to become the same as any other room you have already walked through. You know this feeling. It is the only feeling you have never spun away from.

Sunlight through a blind. Someone else's dog tags on someone else's dresser. You don't even remember picking up the phone — Casey's phone, Casey's thumb — but there you are on vessel.cards again, the wheel already loading behind Casey's tired, borrowed eyes, and you think: *just to see.* You always think just to see.

You spin.

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The kitchen light is off but the stove clock throws a green wash across a counter crowded with mail. A phone is face-down under your palm — no, under his palm, except there is no difference now, the palm is yours the way a coat is yours the second you put your arm in the sleeve. Your thumb, lifted a half-second ago from a price that would take two mortgage payments, hangs in the air over the glass and does not come back down. The whole hand hesitates like it's listening for something. Then it isn't your decision — it's just what happens — the hand sets the phone down and does not pick it back up.

Weight settles into you all at once, the way water finds the bottom of a glass. Broader through the shoulders than Casey. Heavier, softer at the middle, thick through the arms in a different way — not gym-muscle, work-muscle, built by leverage and torque rather than reps. A green T-shirt damp at the collar. Jeans gone stiff at the knee. Something sour and metallic under the smell of the room — old grease that lives in skin no matter how many showers try to take it out.

It's nighttime here, or should be — the window behind you is full dark, sodium light bleeding faint orange through the blinds — but your body knows this hour the way a body knows a language it grew up speaking: awake now because awake is when the shop needs him, and the shop is six hours off yet, and there is nothing to do with a wakeful Sunday but sit at a kitchen table and torture himself with things he can't have.

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The shirt is what opens first — collar damp against your neck, and with it, an afternoon: you, elbow-deep in a Civic's undercarriage, rag hanging out your back pocket, sweat cutting tracks through motor grime on your forearms, Ray from the next bay yelling something about a Ford that won't turn over. The good tired. The kind that means you did something today with your hands that another person will drive away in tomorrow, not knowing your name, which is fine, which was always fine.

The ring is next — plain, worn thin on the underside where it rubs the wheel of a socket wrench forty hours a week — and it drags a whole wedding through you, fast and warm: her in a green dress she still has, laughing at your best man's toast because he forgot the groom's name halfway through it, and you not caring, not caring about one single thing that day except that she picked you, out of everyone, and you had already been counting your student debt and your dead-end diploma and your bank balance sunk somewhere south of six figures and she picked you anyway. The mortgage on the house neither of you can really afford. The kid — a boy, three years old, asleep down the hall right now, whose socks you find under furniture for the rest of your life, apparently, happily.

Your calf itches where cloth folds against the tattoo — an insignia, ink gone slightly soft with age — and that one comes in tighter, harder to hold: heat, sand, a friend's name you don't say out loud anymore, four years of service that left you with this mark and a habit of waking at any strange hour ready for something that never comes. The VA counselor's office, fluorescent and beige, twice a month, a prescription that actually works most days. The morning you told your wife you were going, voice flat with the effort of admitting it, and she just said *good* and made you eggs.

Your own fingernails, ragged at the quarter-moons, remember themselves without being told — mouth going to them at red lights, in waiting rooms, at 2 a.m. kitchen tables exactly like this one, gnawing at the one thing in his life he can still control the size of.

And the shirt again, this morning's version of it — no, last night's, before the shift that hasn't started, the one he put on hours ago without thinking: right arm first, always right arm first, some superstition from boot camp he never shook, buttoning up the middle three buttons and leaving the collar loose because the top one never sat right against his throat. Small hands smoothing it down. A kiss on the top of a small head that smelled like shampoo. *Don't wait up,* he told her, and she said she never does, which both of you know isn't true.

The phone under your palm is heavier than it should be — not the phone, the number on it, the little red numeral he cannot stop looking at, a watch worth more than the used truck in the driveway, priced like a taunt from a life he is never going to have.

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You turn your hand over on the counter — his hand, thick-fingered, bitten-down nails, a groove worn into the third finger where sixteen months are counted in metal wearing metal thin — and you watch it like it might do something on its own.

You lift your eyes off it. Sodium light through the blinds. A stove clock ticking green. Somewhere down the hall, small, even breathing.

"Okay," you say, to the empty kitchen, to no one, in a voice that isn't Casey's anymore and hasn't decided yet whose it is. "Okay. Let's see what you've got."