Trevon Iskra

The screen has been in front of you all afternoon and you have not been anywhere. Sunday, the useless kind, everyone else out doing something with the daylight while you stay in, thumb dragging through the same three apps in the same dead loop, until the loop breaks on an ad you have somehow never seen before — plain white page, a wheel, a price. You have wanted this since before you can date it: every film where someone wakes up wrong, every thread at two in the morning about what it would actually feel like, the question you never got to stop asking because nobody could ever answer it for you. You didn't think it would work. You paid anyway. You spun anyway.

It is the middle of the night somewhere else, and that is where you land.

You are on your side in a dark room, weight sunk into a mattress that isn't the one you fell asleep worrying about, knees drawn up, a phone six inches from a face that is no longer stopped mid-scroll — your thumb is already moving it, faster than his was, flicking past a group chat he'd frozen on, and the blue light doesn't catch a blink for three, four seconds because you forgot, for a second, that this face needs to.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — long-sleeved, worn soft, and with it comes a flash of a woman's voice saying *you'll sleep in that* in a tone that used to be fondness and is now just fact, gone before you can hold it. The mattress under you next: cheap, a single man's mattress, bought alone and never replaced, and a whole apartment arrives with it — one bedroom, brick across the alley, the L close enough that the glass in the window shivers on a schedule you know without checking a clock. Sunday night into Monday morning, and he should be asleep, and some nights he just isn't, not since the divorce took the second body out of the bed and left this exact insomnia in its place, staring at a phone instead of a ceiling because the phone at least changes.

His hands know things before you do. The right thumbnail is bitten past where it should be, a habit that isn't yours and that some small stubborn part of him is always mid-relapse into. You feel where his ring finger is paler than the rest of it, a stripe of skin that never tanned back, and the memory that comes through it isn't dramatic — no fight, no scene — just a Tuesday two years ago, taking the ring off at a kitchen sink because it felt like lying to keep wearing it, and Marisol not saying anything from the doorway because there wasn't anything left to say. You get a full year of her in pieces after that, not because the shirt asks for it but because the hand does, turning that phone screen-down like it used to turn toward her side of the bed to check if she was still awake.

The moustache is new to your face and old to his — he grew it at twenty-two because he thought it made him look like someone who'd been teaching longer than he had, and kept it because the eighth-graders liked to comment on it and that, of all things, is the part of the job he actually loves. Not the pay, which is nothing, which he thinks about at rent time every month with a specific tired dread. Not the parking. The kidney-shaped table. Small chairs. A boy named Isaiah who couldn't read at the start of the year and can now, mostly, and the memory of that arrives whole and warm and takes longer than it should, because you let it — his hands, still, folding a worksheet in half the exact way he folds them every day without thinking, some muscle-memory of patience that has nothing to do with you and that you get to feel anyway, briefly, like borrowing someone's good mood.

The window glass ticks with a train passing empty at this hour, and that sound alone drags up years of it, going back to childhood on the South Side, his mother's radio under the same rattle. Catholic without much ceremony left in it — a rosary in a drawer he hasn't opened, a reflex toward *say a prayer* he still catches himself making. Never drank, never smoked, never needed the excuse; his vice was always just this, the phone, the dark, the scroll that goes nowhere, which is exactly the position you are sitting in now, wearing him, doing the same thing he was doing, only faster, only someone else's thumb behind it.

You stop scrolling. You turn the phone off. You look at your hand — his hand, nail bitten short, that pale stripe on the ring finger catching what's left of the streetlight through the blind — and you turn it over slowly, like it might not hold your weight.

"Okay," you say, to the empty room, to no one. "Okay."

The train is already gone. The apartment is quiet again. You don't know yet if this is four minutes or four years, and neither does anyone — least of all him, wherever he isn't anymore.