Trevor Lindqvist

Esteban Rivas's kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the machine shop still on his hands, and you hate it in a way that surprises you, standing there in his skinny-fat body four minutes old, his phone buzzing on the counter with a name you don't recognize and don't care to. It isn't cruelty. It's just that this one came in wrong — small, tired before it started, a body that already aches in the shoulders at 27 — and you didn't pay for four minutes of somebody else's Wednesday afternoon to stand in his kitchen doing nothing. The wheel is still up on your screen from the last spin, the page never closed, the wheel just sitting there waiting, and Esteban's hand — your hand, for now, for seconds more — moves for the mouse the way his hand probably reaches for a beer he doesn't want. You spin because he isn't enough, because none of them ever quite are, because somewhere in Los Angeles it is early enough in the afternoon that there is nothing better to do with a body you didn't earn.

The wheel turns and lands and the kitchen is gone.

You are bent at the waist with both hands closed around a fuel hose coupling, dusk light coming low and orange off the fuselage above you, and the half-second wrongness hits before anything else does — a hand seating the nozzle a half turn off, then backing it out, then again, slow, correct, checked. You do it once more. And once more after that, ten times running, each click of the coupling inspected like it might bite, though nothing in this body has ever needed to check twice in years. The air smells like jet fuel and cut grass from somewhere beyond the fence line. Ear protection sits cold and dead around a throat that is not yours and is, now, the only throat you have.

It comes in through the coveralls first — heavy cotton gone soft at the elbows, snug across shoulders wider than Esteban's ever were, a weight you'd forgotten a body could carry without complaint. Denim-blue, the collar worn shiny where it rubs a jaw that hasn't seen a razor in three days. This morning, sleeve by sleeve: sitting on the edge of a mattress in a rented room off base, the alarm at four-forty, the low grievance of getting into the same coveralls for the four-hundredth time, checking the breast pocket for a pen that's always there and somehow always surprising to find. Boots next — steel-toed, a half-size loose, broken in by someone else's feet before his — and with them a whole autumn of standing on tarmac, the ache that lives permanently now in the arch of his left foot, ignored the way you ignore a clock in a room you've lived in too long.

The hose is the deepest one. His palms know this coupling the way his tongue knows the roof of his mouth — the twist, the click, the drop-and-catch when it disengages — ten thousand times over, and under that muscle memory there's a whole year: the schoolhouse in Texas, the heat that never once let up, a buddy named Corliss who called him Tex-mix for the accent he doesn't actually have. There's a woman's name that surfaces when his own hand brushes his own collarbone — Paige — three months gone now, and the ache of it isn't loud but it's there, sitting exactly where a bruise sits after you've forgotten why it's tender. She left in March. He still checks his phone first thing some mornings like it might have undone itself overnight.

Your teeth find the edge of a thumbnail before you've decided to let them — already short, already ragged, a habit this body runs without permission, and you feel the old shame of it flare and fade in someone else's nervous system. Twenty-one years in this frame: broad through the shoulders, easy in the knees, a back that doesn't complain yet the way the last one's did constantly. No mark on him anywhere — no ink, no scar, nothing you have to work around — just weather in the skin, calluses laid down honest across both palms, stubble that itches faintly along the jaw where the wind's been at it all shift.

You look down at your hands, still gripped white-knuckled around the coupling, and turn one over slowly in the last of the orange light, like it might not be yours to turn.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, out loud, to the empty tarmac and the dark shape of the plane above you — and you don't know yet if that's true for tomorrow too.