Vincent Marchetti

You are in a freight handler's body, and it has been less than a minute. The knees are already complaining. The bald scalp is sweating under the sun, the beard is damp at the corners of the mouth, and your forearms smell like cardboard and river air. A pallet jack sits in front of you with its handle warm in your fist. You gave this body a trial and it was good. It could lift, it was stubborn, and the green eyes looked out at a loading dock with a bright wet sky above it.

It still wasn't what you wanted. You stood there with the jack handle in your hand and thought about doors. You thought about a man who only ever goes through them one way, and about the thin, dull click of a lock that someone else decides. The wheel was open in your pocket and your thumb knew the place to press. You never say the real reason out loud. This time you don't say it to yourself either. You press.

Then you are standing in a corridor.

The light is a long white tube overhead, and the air is cold and tastes of paint. Your right hand is out at the reader with a card between two fingers, and your left is at your chest, holding the lanyard flat. The rhythm breaks. The card goes in crooked and the reader gives a flat little refusal. You stop. You do it again slowly, correctly, and the bolt lets go with a thunk you feel in your teeth.

You do the next ten things the same careful way. You check the latch, check the gate behind you, check the radio on your shoulder and the keys on your hip. Nothing needs checking. His body is simply amazed that you are doing it.

The shirt comes first. The navy cotton clings at your ribs and the sleeves hug your wrists, and you feel him pulling it over his head in a dark bedroom. The light is off on purpose. A phone is face down on the dresser, and a rosary is looped over the lamp, a plain one of black wooden beads. He touches it every morning without looking and doesn't think about it. Then comes his belt, which is heavy, and the weight of it sits on his hips like an old argument. The keys are cold brass against your thigh. When you close your fingers around them, a whole winter comes up through them: a long cell block, a man shouting a name, a night he went home and sat in the car for twenty minutes before going inside. He has never told anyone about it.

The boots are stiff leather, broken in at the sides. Your heels know the concrete here, and every step has the same fatigue in it. Your back is wide and heavy and a little sore low down, and your belly presses the belt. Your knees feel the years. The beard under your fingers is short and coarse, and when you touch your cheek you find the mole. He used to be embarrassed by it. Someone once kissed it and told him not to be. She had a laugh, a woman with a hallway light on, and a green kettle. Her name is gone. The ache of her isn't. It sits in your chest, patient and old, and he has carried it so long he has stopped feeling it. You feel all of it.

Then the card, thin and warm from his fingers. Your thumb remembers its corner. For twenty-six years he has opened doors for other people to be locked behind. He is good at it. He is kind in the small ways nobody writes down, a cup of water here and a name remembered there. You didn't know any of that when you chose him.

You turn your hand over and look at it. It is broad, creased, and callused along the base of the fingers. It is a hand that has done this ten thousand times, and it is yours now.

You look up at the dark window, where the city sits in beads of colored light. It is still night for him and day for you.

"Morning," you say, and the voice is low and gravelly, a stranger's voice that fits perfectly.

Somewhere underneath, the wanting is already stirring. You don't know whether it will take an hour or ten years.