Travis Oberlin

The apartment is doing the thing it does on Sundays, which is nothing. Scroll, scroll, the blue light, the half-dead plant on the sill you keep meaning to water. You found the site last week in a thread that shouldn't have convinced you and did anyway. Vessel.cards. A wheel on a page, stupid-looking, almost a joke, and under it the kind of fine print that isn't joking at all. You have wanted this since you were a kid watching body-swap movies with the sound too low so nobody would hear what part you rewound. Never a way to actually do it. Until there was.

You pay. You spin. The wheel does its long dumb spin-down, and somewhere in the last half-second before it stops you stop believing in it completely, the way you always do right before something is true.

The leash goes slack in your hand.

Not your hand. His. You feel the weight of it arrive all at once — shoulders, a gut-low strength in the arms, boots planted on broken concrete — and the dog is looking up at you past the hedge, ears back, like it already knows you're not who was holding the leash a second ago. Early light, long and flat and gold, laid sideways down a sidewalk that goes on forever between two fences. Cold air. Your breath — his breath — fogs and goes.

You wind the leash twice around your fist without deciding to. The hand knows. You don't, yet.

It comes in through the leash first, a smell of dog and rubber grip, and then it's a name — Biscuit — and a weekend custody arrangement that isn't a custody arrangement because there's no kid in it, just a dog that used to be both of theirs and is now only his, because Carly moved to Fort Collins eight months ago with somebody who does something with spreadsheets, and the dog stayed, because the dog liked the yard better than it liked her new boyfriend's apartment, and that one fact still makes him grin for half a second every single morning like it's a thing he won. You feel that grin arrive on a mouth that isn't yours yet and is starting to be.

The shirt is next — a blue long-sleeve, soft from a hundred washes, snug over a chest that aches pleasantly, the good kind of sore, the kind that means yesterday was eleven lawns and a trailer full of mowers and a guy named Dez who talks too much about fantasy football while they load the Dixie chopper. The sleeve against your forearm gives you the morning it was pulled on: dark in the bedroom, the heater clicking, him sitting on the edge of the bed working the shirt over his head one arm at a time because the left shoulder's been barking since the retaining wall job, three weeks of lifting block that wasn't his idea but was his back anyway. He rubs the shoulder without looking at it. You feel the ghost of that rubbing now, a memory the muscle has and you're only borrowing.

The jeans know the shape of kneeling in wet grass. The boots know curb heights and the particular give of a lawn that's been overwatered by a sprinkler system some homeowner refuses to have looked at. Calluses along the base of each finger, a half-moon of grease permanently living in one thumbnail no amount of scrubbing gets out. This is a body that works for a living and has made peace with what that costs it — a low throb in the lower back that's just there now, like weather.

There's a tin in the back pocket, a half-circle worn into the denim from years of the same tin riding the same pocket, and touching it through the fabric gives you a whole taste — mint and tobacco, the first pinch of the morning, something he tells himself he'll quit and means it every single time he says it. A big night out comes with it too, twice a month maybe, a bar on Federal with a jukebox that only has half its songs working, him loud and easy with people whose names you don't have yet. And underneath all of it, quieter, a thing he doesn't examine out loud: a shelf at home with a few stones on it, a card deck he reads for himself some nights and never for anyone else, a quiet private faith that doesn't ask to be shared and isn't.

A throat-clear rises up out of nowhere, his own habit firing off without him — without you — asking it to, a tic that isn't nerves, just a motor pattern that's older than this morning. Your eyes do a hard blink to match it. The dog tugs again toward the hedge.

You look down at the hand holding the leash. Turn it over. The calluses, the half-moon of grease, a dark mole somewhere up near your own cheekbone you can't see but can feel like a fact about your face now. Not your hand. His hand. Yours now, for exactly as long as it's yours.

"Okay," you say, to the dog, to the empty sidewalk, to nobody. "Okay, let's go."

The leash winds tighter in your fist and you start walking before the dog has decided to, and somewhere far away and completely unimportant, a wheel on a screen sits waiting to be spun again, and neither of you — not you, not him, not ever again him — has any idea when that will be.