Tyler Bracco

Brian Kessling's shift doesn't start for four hours and he is already sweating through a T-shirt in a kitchen that smells like the inside of a beer can, standing over a laptop propped against a stack of unopened mail. The mail is the reason. Western Kansas at two in the afternoon, blinds down against a sun that doesn't care, and the number at the bottom of the banking app hasn't moved since this morning because numbers like that don't move, they just sit there getting worse. You have been Brian Kessling for one minute. You spun him fifty-four spins ago and you have already stopped wanting him — the shape of him, the shaved head, the muscle that took some other man years to build and cost you nothing — because a minute is enough time to remember that his hole is not much shallower than the last guy's, and this was never about staying anywhere, it is about the half-second between paying and spinning, the only half-second that has ever actually belonged to you. You open the site. The wheel is already spinning by the time you've decided anything.

There is a card table. There is a dried thing on it that used to be a monkey, curled and small under a desk lamp that throws everything else in the room into brown shadow. Your mouth is open on a word you didn't choose — *wish*, maybe, or the front half of it — and then it isn't yours to finish, because you are not finishing it, you are arriving into the middle of it, into a jaw already partway closed, into shoulders that come down out of a hunch you didn't put there. One shrunken finger on the paw curls in against the table's wood grain. Then another. Your hand — his hand — turns the thing over in the lamplight like a man checking a tool for a crack, and you feel, distantly, an itch in a leg you haven't looked at yet, already going.

The paw is warm from his hand, not from anything else, and touching it gives you nothing — dead things don't carry — but the flannel on your shoulders does, worn soft at the elbows, and it comes in sideways: this morning, an apartment courtyard with dry palms leaning over stucco railings, a mirror by the door he doesn't really use, pulling this same shirt on over a black work shirt already buttoned because he was going to be late for the exact thing he is currently doing instead of getting ready for. Tyler Bracco. The name arrives with the shirt's collar, the way a shirt remembers a body's specific slouch. Twenty-two years old and the leg under the table has been bouncing since he sat down and it does not stop now, it's the one thing about him that never asks permission.

The desk lamp is his, bought secondhand, and the light of it brings back nights closing the bar downtown — the reach into the well before opening, bottles by feel, a towel over one shoulder gone permanently gray at one corner no matter how many times it's washed. His hands know that reach without being told, the specific give of a pour spout, the two-count he does in his head that is really closer to three. A calloused thumb pad from a bottle opener that broke six months ago and he never replaced, using his hands instead, the ridge worn into the side of his palm from doing it that way ever since. He is strong in the forearms and shoulders in the way that comes from carrying kegs, not from wanting to be strong. His knees ache a little already, twenty-two and closing four nights a week on concrete floors.

The notebook under his other hand — open, ink gone slightly blue-black in the lamp light — brings back the ex. Her handwriting isn't in it, only the space where she used to sit across this same table before there was a card table, before the apartment got smaller in the way apartments do after someone leaves half the furniture with them out of spite disguised as fairness. He doesn't miss her exactly. He misses being someone whose Monday nights had a shape. He started this — the paw, the lamp, the notebook full of increasingly serious plans for what he'd wish for, sourced off a forum thread he found at three in the morning three weeks ago — half as a joke he was telling himself and half because the number in his own banking app, when he lets himself check it, is uglier than anything Brian Kessling's was. He does not check it often. He is a heavy drinker for reasons that have never needed much unpacking and never gotten any.

The mug by his elbow, cold coffee going skin-thin on top — that one gives you nothing, it's just a mug, but the cards under his other palm, a worn deck he keeps meaning to throw out, bring a whole stupid year: teaching himself sleight of hand off videos, thinking it'd be a thing he was known for behind the bar, a thing that made him more than the tender who remembers your name. It never quite took. He is, underneath all of it, a man waiting to be told what he's for.

You look down at the paw first, still curled in his fingers, then past it to his own hand — the callus, the missing bottle-opener scar that never happened here because his hands did all the opening themselves, the tan line from a watch he sold two paychecks ago. You turn it over once in the lamp light, the way he already had, except now it's you doing the checking.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't rehearsed yet. "Guess that's that."

The leg under the table is still bouncing. You let it.