Tyler Brannock

Reginald's bed is warm and his hip already aches from lying still too long, three in the morning and sleep won't come, and that is the whole reason, really — not some story, just the ache and the dark and the phone charging on the nightstand throwing its little blue light on the ceiling. Sixty-two days into being an old man who used to be somebody else, sixty-two days of a body that creaks getting up to piss, and the wanting comes the way it always comes, not loud, just certain, a hand already reaching for the phone before the rest of him agrees to it. He thumbs to the site in the dark so he doesn't wake nobody, because there's nobody to wake, and that's its own kind of answer. The wheel loads. He pays. He spins. Somewhere the number lands and the room he is in stops mattering.

The path is hard-packed dirt under a foot that isn't landing where it expects to, and for two strides you are nothing but the correction — weight coming down wrong, catching, the body solving a problem you didn't give it. Cold air goes into lungs that are not sore yet, mile four and still strong, and a watch on a wrist you don't recognize buzzes against a bone that is not the bone you had this morning, telling you a split that belongs to nobody. Water on your left, black and moving. A streetlamp throws your shadow long down the towpath, and the shadow keeps running before you've decided anything at all.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Long sleeve, thumbholes, the kind of tight that stopped being about vanity around year two and became about not chafing — and with it comes a whole gray morning, him standing in a rowhouse room barely big enough to turn around in, pulling it on in the dark so he doesn't wake the guy renting him the room, a thirty-year-old landlord who calls him "sir" like it's a joke neither of them has decided to laugh at yet. Forty-eight and back in school on a loan he prays over every semester, an actuarial science degree he is chasing the way some men chase a woman who already left, because the insurance job he had for nineteen years folded under him and nobody would take a man his age to start over except a classroom full of twenty-two-year-olds who don't look up from their laptops when he sits down. He remembers, through the leggings going on one leg and then the other, the smell of the church basement where his men's group meets on Tuesdays, folding chairs and bad coffee, a room of men admitting things out loud that Tyler himself only half admits — that he is lonely in a specific, unglamorous way, that thirty years old is the last time a woman looked at him like a future and not a story she'd tell later.

The earbuds bring their own flash, tinny and small: a sermon podcast, not music, a preacher's voice mid-sentence about endurance, about the race that is set before us, and Tyler running to it every dawn like it's scripture and cardio both, because a doctor once told him forty-five was when the numbers start turning on you and he decided that would not happen to him, not this, not the one thing he still gets to control. The muscle under this skin is not vanity either — it's an insurance man's fear turned into discipline, mornings on this exact towpath since before the degree, since before the layoff, a body he built out of having nothing else scheduled.

The watch against the wrist gives up its own year: buying it on sale, setting the split alerts, comparing the mile-four time against himself every single day like the only person he's still in competition with is the version of him from Tuesday. And under all of it, quieter, the gap in his teeth — you feel it with his tongue before you know why, an old habit, a kid's habit, some grade-school taunt that never fully let go of him even at forty-eight, even now, running in the dark where nobody's looking at his mouth at all.

You feel, too, without being shown a single scene of it, the shape of what he doesn't have: no wife's photo to touch, no kid's height marked on a doorframe, no drink to want and refuse, no cigarette he's quitting — just a duffel bag of clothes worth less than the shoes on his feet, a laptop with his coursework, a Bible with a cracked spine on the nightstand of a rented room, and a habit, when a professor calls on him cold, of his own hands trembling on the desk before his mouth even opens.

Your stride finds its rhythm again, on the other foot now, arms lower than they were, and the watch keeps counting a race that was never yours to start.

You look down at the hand swinging at your side — his hand, blunt-fingered, a callus at the base of the thumb from gripping a pen too hard in exam rooms — and you turn it once in the graying light like you're checking it's attached.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, breath fogging, "let's see what You've got for me today" — and you don't know yet if that's a prayer of his left running in your mouth or a joke of your own, and you keep running either way, because there's no reason yet to stop.