Travis Kilbane

The evening has no shape to it. That's the whole reason you're at the screen at all — nothing on, nothing due, the kind of Monday that ends the way it started, and you have had this fascination since before you can date it, the private kind, the kind you don't bring up at parties. Waking up as someone else. Being let out of your own life for an hour. You have read every thread on it at two in the morning for years, and none of it was ever real, and then a page loads called vessel.cards and there is a wheel on it, gaudy and stupid-looking, and you pay before you can talk yourself out of it, and you spin.

There is no falling. There is no white light, no tunnel, nothing between. There is a chain in your hand, cold, heavier than it should be, and your arm is already moving to hook it and your arm does the motion wrong — flinches, some wire crossed between wanting and doing — and then again, slow, correct, and you feel a body around you take a breath that isn't a decision, it's just what bodies do. A highway shoulder. Dark past the flares. A flatbed's amber light turning the guardrail orange and then not orange. Your — his — hands finish the hookup. Ten more times, checked, each one, on a job that hasn't needed checking since he was twenty-five.

The jacket is the first thing that talks. Carhartt, gone soft and pale at the elbows, and it gives you a morning — not this one, some other one, cold enough that his wife told him to zip it before he left, and he didn't, because he never does, and she rolled her eyes the way she always does, fondly, over coffee she'd already poured for herself and not him because he takes his in the truck. Travis. That's the name that comes with the jacket, the way a smell comes with a room. Travis Kilbane, and the shirt underneath — thin, a little too small in the shoulders now, bought four years and eleven pounds of muscle ago — gives you the gym in back of the Marathon station, cinder block, no AC, where he goes after doubles because a body has to be good for something even when the rest of it isn't going anywhere.

The chain in your — his — hand gives you more than the jacket does. Calluses don't lie. This hand has done this ten thousand times: hook, ratchet, check the angle, check it again out of a habit older than caution. It knows the weight of a Silverado versus a Civic before the winch takes the strain. It aches a little in the first knuckle, an old thing, not worth a doctor. The forearm is thick, corded, the kind of strength that came from the work and not from wanting it, though he likes it fine, likes catching his own reflection in a truck window some mornings and thinking, not bad, Travis, not bad — and then feeling stupid for thinking it, because vanity isn't a thing his church raises you to sit with.

The ring is the one that costs something. Plain, worn thin on the underside where it rubs the wheel. It gives you a wedding in a hall with folding chairs and a borrowed sound system, gives you her in blue because white felt like a promise she wasn't sure yet she could keep and he loved her more for saying so out loud. It gives you six years of a bed with two sides worn to two different shapes. It gives you Sunday mornings, her hand finding his in the pew without looking, the pastor's voice going on about labor as a kind of prayer, and Travis believing it, mostly, on the nights the tow calls don't come in until 3 a.m. and he still goes, because somebody's got to and it might as well be him.

It gives you the drinking too, rare enough that it's almost sacred when it happens — a six-pack split two ways on the porch after a bad month, a cigarette he only wants when the beer's already in him, lighting it off her lighter because he never carries his own, because carrying one would mean it's a habit and he's decided it isn't. It gives you the diner across the street, closed now, CLOSED FOR GOOD taped inside the glass since March, and the particular grief of a town losing the one place everybody used to sit down in. It gives you the stoplight, red now, red always at this hour, blinking for nobody. It gives you a body that likes work with its hands and doesn't especially like being looked at too closely otherwise — one eye doing its own thing, has since he was a kid, and thirty-three years of people's eyes sliding just slightly off his and him letting them.

The night shift is why you're here at all instead of some ordinary supper hour — his clock bent sideways from yours by his own choosing, months back, better money, quieter roads, a wife who sleeps through it and kisses him goodbye at 9 p.m. instead of good morning. You feel that trade in the tiredness sitting low behind his sternum, dull and familiar, nothing he'd call suffering.

The chain settles. The truck is hooked. The night is enormous and empty and orange at the edges, and you are standing in the middle of somebody's whole quiet life with his hands hanging at his sides, done with the motion they were doing.

You look at them. Blunt fingers, a scar you didn't put there across one knuckle, the ring catching the flare-light. You turn the hand over once, like it might answer something.

"—the hell," you say, in his voice, low, more wonder in it than fear, and you don't finish the sentence, because there's nothing after it yet, and you lift your eyes off your own hand and out toward the empty road like it might tell you how long you get to keep it.