Travis Kowalek

Gordon's hand — bald head, freckled scalp catching the grey Toronto light through the condo blinds — is still on the mouse when the wanting comes back. Less than a minute in him and already it itches: the retired flatness of the place, the smell of instant coffee going cold, the way this body's knees complain just standing up from the chair. You did not come back to the wheel for Gordon. You came back because Gordon is boring, and because four spins ago you wore a man named Ruben Salcedo, and in Ruben's phone, still logged in somehow, in some account you shouldn't have been able to see, there was a name that kept coming up. A best friend. Moving day. A little green dot that meant online now. You remember, in Ruben's own remembered fondness, thirty years of a friendship you borrowed for less than a minute and then had to give back. You want to stand inside it from the other side. That is the whole reason, and it is not one you would say to anyone, least of all to Gordon, whose hand is already reaching for the mouse, for the wheel, for the spin that ends him.

The screen resolves into a room that isn't Gordon's.

You have his weight before you have his name — a taller frame, an easy strength in the shoulders, a box's cardboard edge biting into a hip that doesn't ache the way Gordon's did. Late morning light, low sun through a bare window, throwing everything long and amber across unfinished floors. Keys still hanging in a deadbolt behind you. Your own arms in front of you, sleeves pushed up, ink faded at the edges — a ship, a woman's face, colors gone soft the way old work does. You set the box down slow, the way a body does when it already trusts the floor under it, and your hand goes flat against drywall, knuckles trailing along a corner like you're greeting the house.

The keys give you the first flash: his hand, this hand, twisting them out of an old lock this morning, a different door, an apartment already half empty, his wife's voice from another room asking if he got the thing off the mantel. Travis. The name arrives with the sound of it in her mouth — *Trav* — and behind it a whole marriage unspools sideways, unbidden: sixteen years, a wedding on a beach that was too cold for what they'd planned, her laughing about it anyway. A daughter, eleven, who calls this new place "the boring house" and means it as a joke.

The wall under your fingers gives you nothing — it's new, it hasn't been lived in yet — but the shirt against your back is old, and it opens like a door left ajar. Henley, dark grey, worn soft at the collar. You feel him choose it this morning in a bedroom still full of boxes, pulling it over his head one-armed because the other hand already had a coffee mug in it, his wife's voice again, gentler now, telling him to eat something before he starts lifting things. Diabetes — the word doesn't arrive as a fact, it arrives as a habit, a testing kit zipped into a bag by the door, a small tired vigilance that has become just Tuesday. Your knees are fine. Your back is fine. Forty-seven and still climbing roofs for a living, and the body under this shirt knows that in its shoulders, in forearms roped from decades of brush rods and rope and hauling soot-black canvas — an ease in the joints that Gordon never had, that nobody past forty gets for free.

The mole on your cheek you don't feel so much as know is there, the way you know your own face without a mirror — high, dark, exactly where photographs of him would show it, the one detail anyone who knew him would say first. Something about a chimney sweep in a town that mostly heats with oil and electric, an old-country trade he fell into sideways at twenty-two and never left, soot under the nails no soap ever quite got out. Boots on hardwood, unfamiliar hardwood, new-place hardwood. A ring on the left hand throws a small flash of its own — a courthouse afterparty, folding chairs, someone's cousin playing guitar badly and everyone loving it anyway.

And under all of it, quieter than the rest, is Ruben. Not a memory Travis has — a thing Travis *is*, from the outside, the way you knew him from the inside four spins back: thirty years of phone calls, a groomsman's toast that made the whole room cry, a debt neither of them ever mentions that runs both directions and evens out. You reach for more of it and it isn't there to reach for, because it isn't your history in this body, it's only the shape of a friendship you already wore once, from the other end, less than a minute of it, gone now, folded into a man three spins behind you.

You look down at your hands — his hands, tan, tattooed, a plain gold band catching the amber light coming low through a window that isn't yours yet either — and you turn them over once, like checking they're real.

"Hell of a view for a Monday," you say, to the empty room, to no one, and your voice comes out lower than you expected, warm with a life that isn't finished arriving.