Travis Bearclaw

Frank Kowalczyk's knees ache before he even stands up straight, and that's the thing you notice first, before you notice anything else about being him — the two-minute walk from the truck to the bathroom this morning felt like a job in itself. Sixty-five years in a body that fixes other people's pipes for a living, and every joint in it presents you with a bill. You'd read that as character on the site's little card: athletic build, it says, like that word hasn't been renegotiated by fifty years of ladders and crawlspaces. The lazy eye drifts when he's tired, which is always. You've been him less than a minute — flushed the toilet, washed his hands under water that's too hot because his hands don't feel it right anymore, caught the drift-eyed stranger in the mirror who is currently you — and you are already thinking about the wheel.

It isn't boredom exactly. It's that his body came with a Sunday already spent: church done, casserole promised to a neighbor, a Bears game he doesn't care about muted in the other room. Nothing left in the day that needs Frank Kowalczyk specifically. You dry your hands on his shirt, feel the twinge that lives permanently in his lower back, and think: not this one, not today. You go back to the site on his phone, the one with the wheel on it, thumb hovering the way it has three hundred and twenty-two times before.

The wheel spins the way it always does, no ceremony, and then you are sitting up straight on a couch you've never sat on, in a room that was dark half a second ago and is still dark now, and a remote is going down onto the couch arm in a hand that is not Frank's — thicker through the palm, a wedding band catching the TV's blue wash, and the forearm above it inked solid with something that used to be someone's team crest, a wolf's head in a hexagon, worn soft at the edges the way old ink goes. The show on the screen cuts to a bright frame — some laugh line delivered by somebody in a kitchen set — and you don't laugh. You never laughed at this one anyway. You just watch him not laugh either, this new mouth, and feel how full his chest is when he breathes, how the couch cushions have a shape worn into them that fits this exact weight.

The shirt is what opens first — plain black cotton, a little tight now across a belly that's gone soft and comfortable, and putting it on this morning comes back to you sleeve by sleeve, in his hands: standing in front of the closet in the turquoise house, humidity already climbing outside though it's barely nine, choosing the shirt because it doesn't show ink transfer or stray pigment the way lighter ones do, an old habit from years of leaning over other people's skin. His shoulder aches faintly where he slept on it wrong. There's a callus on the side of his right middle finger, thick and specific, that no amount of soap has ever fully softened — the machine sits there for hours at a time, six days a week, and the finger has just decided to become that instead of skin.

The wedding band on his left hand is warm from his own body heat and it brings back a wedding in October, outdoor, too much wind, her laughing at how the officiant kept losing his page, and how sure he'd felt standing there despite every joke people made about tattoo guys and commitment. That certainty sits oddly now next to something else the ring lets through — a woman who is not his wife, more recent, her voice saying something he still hasn't fully forgiven himself for agreeing with, an ending that isn't finished being an ending. He does not let himself think her name for long. There's a kid somewhere in the house — small shoes by a door, a drawing taped to a fridge that the memory offers up sideways, more feeling than image, pride so plain it embarrasses him.

The couch under him carries the whole shop, oddly — not this couch, the other one, the client chair reclined and empty in the gap between appointments, coffee gone cold, the particular ache of standing bent over someone's shoulder blade for three hours translated into muscle memory his back still performs even sitting still. His blood finds his pulse a little too present at the temples, a low hum that's just always there now, the doctor's blood pressure cuff, the pills he mostly remembers to take. He has a drink or two most evenings, never smoked, doesn't know why he's thinking about a cold beer at eleven in the morning except that some Sundays run long and this one already has, somehow, though the clock on the cable box insists it's barely past noon.

You look down. His hands: broad, a little swollen at the knuckle, gloved a thousand times over in another life that flashes and is gone, the wolf's head crest catching the TV light on the forearm turned palm-up in his lap. You turn the hand over once, slow, like checking it's real, like checking whose it is now.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the empty dark room, in a voice that isn't Frank's anymore and was never yours to begin with — lower, rounder, a little stunned at itself. Outside the window, El Paso is white with noon. You don't know yet how long you get to sit in that light being him. You don't ask.