Tyler Baskin

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It's the middle of the morning where you are, and nothing is happening to you, which is the whole problem. You've scrolled through everything there is to scroll through. You have had this want in you for years — not a new one, not a phase, just a low hum underneath everything else, the specific hunger of wondering what it is to be someone else, completely, down to the weight of their arms. You found the site the way you find everything, by falling sideways into it at two clicks past boredom. vessel.cards. A wheel, rendered clean and slow-spinning on a black field, like it's been waiting. You didn't believe it. You paid anyway. You spun.

You are standing in heat.

Not metaphorical heat — real heat, radiant, pressing on the front of a face that is not your face, coming off a river of white-orange light pouring itself out of a tipped ladle into a mold below. Your hand — his hand — is wrapped around a rod, guiding the pour, and for one half-second the rhythm snags: the rod tilts a hair too far, corrects, tilts right. Then the next ten pours come out slow and checked, each one, like a man relearning a thing his body has done ten thousand times. Nobody around you notices. The foundry noise doesn't change. The light coming off the ladle doesn't change. You are just suddenly the one standing in the glove.

It is evening here, wherever here is — a tin-roofed shop with the big door open onto hard blue dusk, sagebrush going purple at the edges of a gravel lot, a trailer on blocks catching the last flat light on its siding. Tuesday ending for him while Wednesday sits around you, unmoved, fluorescent, elsewhere. The oddness of it doesn't resolve. It just sits there, true.

The gloves come first — thick, stiff, scorched pale along the knuckles — and touching the rod through them gives you a flash: this same rod, this same ladle, a winter morning with ice on the windshield of a truck outside, a foreman named Hollis who no longer works here, a joke about the Raiders that didn't land. Gone before you can hold it. Then more, layered, arriving out of order the way memory does when it isn't yours to begin with.

The jacket against your back — heavy leather, grey with old heat-scorch, dense with the smell of scale and oil and something scorched-sweet underneath — gives you a whole morning: him pulling it off a hook by the door of the trailer, shrugging it on over a black T-shirt still damp from the shower, the zipper catching the way it always catches, a thumb-and-twist move he does without looking. Boots next, steel-shanked, laced in four crosses and a double knot, the left one always looser because of how his ankle sits. He did this twenty minutes before you arrived in him, humming nothing, radio off, coffee gone cold on the counter because he'd rather be early than caffeinated.

You feel the body underneath the gear with an honesty that startles you: twenty-two years in it, long-boned, strong through the shoulders in the specific way furnace work builds a man — not gym-strong, work-strong, built by resisting weight rather than chasing it. A dull ache low in the back that he's stopped noticing. Forearms that know the exact drag of a full ladle before his mind catches up to warn him. Calluses on the pads below each finger, a clean-shaven jaw that still remembers this morning's razor. No rings. No ink. Nothing on him that isn't earned by the work itself.

And underneath that, further down, the parts of him nobody at the foundry asks about: a trailer that's his alone, no one waiting in it, a fridge with more beer in it than food, the particular quiet of eating dinner off his knees in front of a TV he barely watches. A girl two years back who left before anything got far enough to be called a loss. No note left behind, no hole shaped like her — just an absence he filled with shifts and bottles and not much else, the way a man fills things when there's no one keeping score. He drinks like it's scheduled. He's never smoked — tried it once at nineteen, hated it, never again. And his hands — his hands are the thing, even now, even full of a rod he's not pouring from anymore. Resting isn't a thing they do. On break they find a bolt to spin, a cigarette lighter that isn't his to click, anything.

The pour finishes. The ladle tips back level. Whatever he was going to do next — set the rod down, radio the next batch, wipe his forehead with a wrist already too hot to help — doesn't happen, because you're standing still, inside him, feeling your own borrowed pulse doing his ordinary work.

You look down at the glove. At the hand inside it, which is his and is, for however long this lasts, yours.

You say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't the one you don't have: "Okay."

Nobody around you looks over. The furnace keeps its light going. Somewhere behind your eyes, a wheel is still spinning, and you don't know yet when you'll let it.