Travis Wenninger

The screen has been open for an hour. Not doing anything with it — just open, the way a tab stays open when you don't trust yourself to close it, because closing it means admitting you were never going to click. You have wanted this since before you knew there was a word for it. Every story where someone wakes up wrong, every thread at two in the morning that you told yourself you were reading for the writing. A wheel. A price. A button that says spin. It is a dull Wednesday and there is nothing on and you have never once been able to buy the thing you wanted most, and now, apparently, you can.

You spin it.

There is no falling, no tunnel, none of the theater you always imagined. There is a candle flame very close to your face and your own breath already spent on it, and a second breath following the first one into your lungs that you did not ask for, that arrives already moving, already yours. The room goes dark the way a room goes dark when a small light is the only light. Smoke stands straight up in front of you, thin and gray, and you are leaning over a counter with both hands flat on cool stone, and your cheeks are still hollowed from the blowing, and the candle is between two fingers now, lifted, and it is not that you decided to lift it. It was already lifting.

You are standing in a kitchen you have never seen, holding a candle you have never held, wearing a body that is not tall and not heavy and smells like sunscreen and truck upholstery and something green, pine maybe, worked into the collar of a t-shirt that isn't the uniform shirt but remembers being one.

The counter comes first. Granite, cool, real — and under your palm a memory surfaces without asking: leaning on this same counter this morning with coffee, radio low, half-listening for the sound of the shower running down the hall because Adam takes forever and it's endearing now in a way it wasn't the first year. Adam. The name arrives with a whole weather system behind it — six years, a courthouse in Golden with folding chairs, a dog they talked about getting and didn't, an argument about paint colors that turned into something else on the back porch until one of them started laughing and it was fine, it was always fine with Adam eventually.

The shirt. Cotton, worn soft, the collar a little loose from being pulled over the ponytail so many times without unhooking the hair first. It comes back sleeve by sleeve: this morning, no — not morning, this exact evening, pulling it over his head after work, after the trailhead, after standing by the wooden sign with pines at his back explaining to a family from Missouri which loop was the easy one and which loop lied about being easy. The radio clipped to his collar all day, its little plastic weight against his chest, dispatch chatter he mostly tuned into the way you tune into weather. His feet ache in a low, familiar way from boots that are good boots, broken in, still boots. Size nine and a half feet that know exactly how much give is in a mile of trail and how much isn't.

The tattoo on his arm — you can't see it but you can feel where it sits, a faint permanent awareness like a shirt tag you stopped noticing years ago — fine lines, geometric, a shape he picked at twenty-four because he liked that it meant nothing in particular and everyone assumed it meant something. His left hand is on the ring. He's been turning it with his thumb without knowing he does that, a habit that started the week after the wedding and never stopped. The metal is warm from his own skin, which is strange to arrive into secondhand and still true.

Under the shirt: type 2, diagnosed three years back, the small architecture of it folded into his day so completely it isn't even a thought anymore — a testing kit in a drawer, a different reason to say no to the second slice, a low hum of carefulness around cake specifically, around tonight specifically, that got overruled tonight by twenty-eight and one candle and Adam's voice from somewhere behind him saying make a wish, babe, hurry up before the wax gets on the frosting.

And under that, further down, quieter: a name that isn't Adam's. Someone from before, three months gone, who texted last week for no reason anyone needed to explain, and Travis didn't answer, and felt good and bad about not answering in exactly equal amounts, and hasn't told Adam that the phone buzzed at all. It sits in him the way a stone sits in a shoe you've decided to keep wearing.

The body under all of it: twenty-eight, average through the shoulders, strong in the legs and low back from a job that is mostly walking, a small permanent stiffness in the left knee that flares on the long descents, hazel eyes that have spent all day squinting into mountain light and are grateful, right now, for the dark kitchen. Nothing remarkable about the face. He has never once, in his whole life, been the most anything in a room, and has never minded.

You are still holding the candle. Smoke has stopped rising. Somewhere past this kitchen a voice — Adam's, you know it now, you know the shape of it — is saying something warm and unhurried, waiting on him, waiting on you, to turn around.

You look down at the hand holding the candle instead. Turn it. The wedding band catches what little light there is.

You lift your eyes off it into the dark of the room, toward where the voice is, and you say, "Give me one second," to buy the only thing you actually need — a moment nobody in this kitchen knows is for you.