Travis Wayne Dunaway

You have been at the screen a while. It is early, the day not started, a Friday that hasn't done anything yet. You've scrolled past everything twice. For years you have gone looking for the threads, the films, the late posts from people who swear they woke up in someone else, and tonight there is a page with a wheel on it and a price. You pay. You spin. You do not believe it.

The show cuts to a bright frame.

You are sitting up straight. The couch is under you, sagging and warm, and the remote is in your right hand until you set it on the arm. The room is dark except for the screen moving across your face. Your face. Beard against your chest, a weight you can feel when you swallow.

Cloth first. The t-shirt, worn thin, rubs your shoulders, and it gives you a morning: his thumbs hooking it off a chair in the dark, a sour smell of diesel and sleep, and under it the thought *one more week of this and I'll call her.* Not yours. His, with a taste of shame in it.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. Denim on skin brings the truck stop at first light, the pump handle cold, coffee scalding his tongue, a trucker at the next island calling him *preacher* because of the cross, and his laugh, easy, because he liked it.

The couch fabric under your fingers is frayed, picked at. Your hand will not be still. It drums the cushion, rubs the seam, picks a thread loose. It wants a cigarette and does not know why; the want is eight years stale and still arrives like a habit of the arm. Then a kitchen, years back, a girl in a high chair, a woman's voice saying his name flatly, the last time she said it that way. A small shoe on a tile floor. Something in the chest sinks and holds.

Your feet are in socks on a cool floor. The air smells of beer gone flat and old takeout. Cans on the table, a few, not many; he saves the big nights for once or twice a month, and this isn't one. His back aches low, the long ache of eleven hours seated, and the belly is soft over a narrow frame. Under the collar, the ink on your chest itches. You feel a church basement, folding chairs, a hand on his shoulder, a pastor's voice, him at twenty-two crying and meaning it. He still means it. Money is thin, and the thinness lives in him like a second pulse, a number he checks in his head every day.

You are his coworker. You knew his name from the dock, from the radio. You never knew this.

You lift both hands into the television light and turn them over. Chapped knuckles, a nick on the thumb, fingers still moving, restless.

You look up and say, quietly, "Okay. So it's you."

The couch creaks. The screen flares, and you wonder how long you get to keep it.