Tyler Vosnak

The dining room light is the kind of fluorescent that makes a man look already dead, and you have been sitting under it for eleven minutes deciding nothing, which is its own kind of answer. Ohio outside the window is going that particular gray-orange of a Monday ending. You are sixty-three in this one, or you're wearing sixty-three — the nose that got broken once and never quite forgiven, the gut that came from a desk and a company car, the sales binder still open on the table to a page you stopped reading. He'd had a wife once, this man, or the last version of him had, and there's an ache in the shoulder from carrying sample cases that you've inherited along with everything else. You have had him less than a minute. That is the whole complaint. Not that anything is wrong with him — he is fine, he is functional, he will close deals until he retires and die on a Tuesday surrounded by people who loved him adequately — but a minute is long enough to feel the whole shape of a life like this and know you have already lived it, one hundred times over in different weather. Two hundred, now, if you count tonight. You do not finish the coffee at your elbow. You open the laptop instead, and there's the wheel, spinning lazy under your cursor like it's been waiting, and you put in the card without asking yourself why, because the honest answer is boredom wearing the mask of appetite, and you have gotten good at not looking under the mask.

The power drops for two seconds in a tattoo shop on the other side of the country, and when it comes back you are the arm.

You are also the rest of him, but the arm is what you notice first, because it has stopped flinching. It was braced under a needle a breath ago — his breath, still half in your chest like borrowed air — and now the muscle has gone loose and easy under green soap and someone else's gloved hand, and the small sting of it arrives distant, like weather in another county. Your head is turned away from the work. Your jaw, which was set hard enough to ache, has come loose too. You watch the needle go into the forearm like you're watching it happen to a countertop.

Then the shirt.

It's not much of a shirt — gray tee, thin from washing, and the second your shoulders settle into it you get him putting it on this morning, half-asleep, in the low ceiling light of a garage apartment cut into a hillside, the driveway outside steep enough that his old Civic groans going up it. He'd stood in front of the mirror bolted to the back of the closet door and pulled this exact shirt over his head one-armed, still holding his phone in the other hand, thumbing through a text thread with a name he hasn't deleted — Jenna — three words she sent last week that he still hasn't answered, not because he's cruel but because he doesn't know yet if answering means anything. That ache sits low and quiet, nothing dramatic, just a Tuesday-shaped sadness he's gotten used to carrying like a second wallet.

The stool under you is cold through the denim, and the denim gives you more: these are the jeans he wears on days off, the ones with the coffee stain on the left knee that never came out, a permanent little map of the espresso machine he stands behind six mornings a week, steam wand hissing, the particular ache in his forearm from tamping grounds a hundred times a shift, an ache that is different from this one but lives in the same arm, stacked on top of it like sediment. His hands, when you're not asking them to do anything, want to crack the knuckles — you feel the want arrive before you understand it's his, an old tic, comfort disguised as habit.

The collar of the shirt sits open at the throat and against your skin you feel the tattoo before you remember getting it — the first one, cross and praying hands, done years ago in a shop that smelled like this one, for a grandmother who is dead now and Protestant to the bone, who used to press two fingers to that same spot on her own chest when she prayed over Sunday dinner. He got it not because he's especially devout — he skips more Sundays than he makes — but because some things you do for people who can't check up on you anymore, and it still feels like the truth even from the outside of belief.

The gloved hand on your arm keeps moving. Green soap, faint antiseptic smell, the specific quiet of a shop where three machines are going and nobody's talking over them. Somewhere in that quiet is every night he's had here in the city — one big one a month, maybe two, a bar with people from work he likes fine and doesn't call outside of it, waking up the next day feeling twenty-two and breakable in a way he never says out loud. No nicotine ever, he never saw the point. Not much money either — enough for rent on the garage, for this tattoo, for the next one probably, nothing saved that would survive a bad year. He isn't waiting for anything in particular. He is just going, the way you go at twenty-two, certain there's more of it coming than there is.

You look down at the arm — his arm, wet and reddened where the needle's been, skin under the black lines already starting to feel like something that belongs to you the way a coat belongs to whoever's wearing it, which is to say completely, for now — and you turn the hand over once, slow, watching the tendons move like you built them.

Then you lift your eyes to the artist crouched over the machine, and you say, "Hey — can we take five?"

Under the words is the part you don't say to him or to yourself too loudly: that you don't know yet if this is a long stay or a short one, whether you'll be sitting in this chair again next month asking for the second half of this same tattoo, or whether something will call you back to that wheel before the ink even scabs. Nobody knows. That's the whole arrangement.