Vincent Arceneaux

You are at a screen in the middle of a Saturday, and the day has gone slack. Work is behind you, and the scrolling has gone nowhere. Nothing is on. You have wanted this since before you had words for it: the films where someone wakes in another man's body, the threads at two in the morning, the private hunger of it. Tonight it is for sale. You do not believe it. You pay, and the wheel turns, and a name lands under the pointer, a man, a neighbor, someone you have nodded to from across a wet street.

Then there is mattress under your cheek, and a hum of dark.

Your breath is ragged and then, in one pull, it is even. His arm hangs off the bed and you draw it up. The body rolls onto its back and the hands fold on your chest. He has never once slept like this. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the bedclothes like a blade.

The T-shirt is soft with washing, and it gives you something unasked. A kitchen, years ago, a woman's back turned to him at a sink, and his certainty that if he said the right sentence it would hold. He did not say it. The shame of that sits in the cotton over his ribs.

The sheet is under your fingers, and the fingers crack themselves, knuckle by knuckle, without being asked. That gives you a porch, mid-morning, coffee going cold on the rail, steam lifting off the street after rain and a daughter's voice on the phone saying *Dad, just come up for Easter.* He wanted to. He said he'd see. The ache of that is his and it sits behind your sternum.

Then the pale band on the ring finger, where your thumb keeps going, rubbing at a ring that is not there. Church, a Sunday, the weight of it new on him, a priest's hand lifted. Then a lawyer's office and the ring coming off in his pocket, and how he stood at the curb afterward not knowing which way to walk.

The body underneath all of it: six foot two and soft through the middle, knees that complain, a lower back like a drawer that sticks. Your scalp feels the cool air through thin hair. The beard is wiry against your jaw. A scar drags at one eyebrow, and you remember, in his feeling, a ladder, a rung, a bright bang and his brother laughing, afraid, laughing. Whiskey is a taste he left behind, and the clean thirst of that is in his mouth.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are big, freckled, a little swollen at the joints. A tan line ghosts the ring finger. You flex them and they answer.

You look up, into the dark, into nothing, into whoever is watching, and you say it out loud in a voice that is deeper than yours:

"Well. Hello, Vincent."

The house ticks. Somewhere a car passes, wet tires on the street. You are in him, and you do not know for how long. You think of the wheel, still turning somewhere behind your eyes.