Trent Beauchamp

The alarm hasn't gone off yet, but you're awake anyway, lying in this Pittsburgh body that isn't yours and never will be, listening to the radiator knock. Forty-seven years old. Gray hair on the pillow you didn't choose. You've had him less than a minute and already you know how this one ends — not badly, just *smaller* than you wanted. Blue eyes on a face that reports to a regional office at nine. Freckled arms that shake a stranger's hand and close deals on injection-molded plastics. You spun for this and told yourself it would feel like something. It doesn't. It feels like Monday. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, and you are, this once: not tragedy, not hunger exactly, just the specific boredom of knowing every hour of a day before you live it. So before the coffee, before the shower, you find the site again on your phone, thumb steady in a way it wasn't the first time, all those spins ago. You spin.

The alley smells like last night's beer and cardboard, and your arm is already extended, a box halfway into the van, and it comes out of your hand wrong — tilts, nearly drops — and you catch it, correct it, set it down with the exaggerated care of someone defusing something. The next box. The next. Each one checked, weighed, placed like it might detonate, on a loop this body's hands could run blind. Neon leaks down the brick from a lounge sign three doors up. Your head is light with a taller man's blood pressure, and it is very late, or very early, depending which of you is asking.

The shirt is what opens first — brown cotton, a name-brand nobody would recognize, worn soft at the collar from three years of the same collar — and through it comes the five a.m. dark of a bedroom, a woman's shape turned away from him under the blanket, the particular quiet of dressing without waking her. Reagan. Her name arrives with her breathing. He'd stood at the dresser doing the buttons by streetlight because the overhead woke her up once and she hadn't let him forget it. He likes — liked — the shape of that argument, how it wasn't really one, how she'd thrown a pillow and gone back to sleep smiling. That's the marriage he doesn't have yet, the one he's building without a ring because neither of them see the rush. The shorts came next, then socks pulled up over calves that have logged four years of routes and know every curb in six ZIP codes.

The scanner on his belt is the deepest room. It has been in his hand more hours than anything else in his life including her. Through its plastic grip comes the whole architecture of this job: the warehouse at 4 a.m. under sodium light, the manager who calls him "Beach" like it's clever, the year he trained a nineteen-year-old who quit after a week and Trent felt, unreasonably, like a failure for it. The mole on his cheek surfaces in memory too, secondhand — a girl in high school who called it his best feature, meant to be sweet, and it embarrassed him for a decade after. He is skinny in a way that used to worry his mother and now just is what it is; his back knows this particular twist-and-lift, his knees know these van steps, his lungs know the vape pen in the cupholder that he only touches at bars, laughing at something, never at home. He drifted off drinking two years ago without deciding to — just noticed one week he hadn't, then never started again. Nothing dramatic. A church every third Sunday when Reagan's mother visits. Money enough that none of this — the shorts, the alley, the night route — is necessity so much as a stubbornness he's proud of and never says out loud, the business he's building on the side with the kind of numbers that would surprise anyone who saw the uniform first.

None of it is his anymore. It sits in you like furniture in a house you're renting.

You look down at his hand — long fingers, a callus along the first knuckle from the scanner's weight, a mole's shadow flickering at the edge of your vision from his own cheek — and you turn it over slowly under the neon, and you say, to no one, to the alley, to the sleeping city that doesn't know its Monday has changed hands:

"Didn't know I had this in me."

Somewhere in Pittsburgh a gray-haired man's alarm is about to go off in an apartment that's already empty of him. Here it is the middle of the night, and you are new, and there is no telling yet how long you intend to stay.