Wade Lindqvist

You are standing in Dennis Hoang's kitchen in Dallas, and the linoleum is cold through his socks. Fifty-six years old, he has a knee that clicks on the stairs and a stack of ungraded essays on the table. None of it is wrong. The body works. You could keep it.

But an hour ago, in this same kitchen, one of his students' mothers called him a kind man in an email, and you read it three times looking for the place where it was about you. It wasn't. It was about him, a man you had been for less than a minute. You can't stand to be thanked for being someone you only borrowed. So you carry his phone to the table, and the page is already open, and the wheel is already turning.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is a mattress under your hip, a thumb already moving against glass, and blue light six inches from your eye. The room is black past the screen. The air is dry, with dust and old cotton in it, and a distant sweetness of cut wheat coming through a window cracked an inch. Your breath goes in slower than Dennis's, and your chest is wide and tight.

You keep scrolling, because the thumb will not stop. It knows this. You let it flick past a truck ad, a face, a recipe.

The sheet is under your fingers, washed thin, and something comes with it. A woman's laugh at the foot of this bed, a month ago, her cold feet on his calves. Her name is Jolene. He was happy, plain and surprised about it, the way a man is when he stops bracing. Behind her, fainter, comes another girl, an old one, in a Buick's passenger seat with her shoes off. A bridge of nothing. He doesn't text her. He thinks about not texting her.

The gray T-shirt on your chest is soft and shrunken. A key ring surfaces from it, three brass keys and a bottle opener, and the morning he put it on over his head with the day's list already running: nails, the Hendricks order, unlock at seven. His hands remember the apron string, the double knot, the clipboard under his arm. The shop smells of cut keys and linseed oil, and he loves it with no embarrassment. His father died in that store's back office. He was nineteen, and he took the broom and swept the floor of the place he now owns.

Your nose throbs faintly. A crooked bridge, set by a doctor in a hurry after a boy's elbow in a high school gym. Your bare head is cool against the pillow. The beard is rough under your knuckle when you touch your jaw. Your calves ache from lifting fifty-pound bags of salt. Your shoulders are strong. They are his, and they are good.

You stop scrolling. The light sits on your face and you stop blinking.

You lift your free hand into the glow. Calluses across the palm, a nick by the thumbnail, the skin cracked at the knuckles from the weather. You turn it over. Then you look up, past the phone, into the dark.

"Hello, Wade," you say, and your voice is lower than you expected.

Outside, a thunderhead you can't see is stacking over the stubble. Somewhere another wheel could already be turning. You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether you will still be him when the shop opens.