Walter Chessman

Three minutes is not long enough to love a body, but it's long enough to hate one. You are Danilo Reyes for three minutes — this narrow chest, these small hands smelling of stem-cut chrysanthemums and floral tape, the walk-in cooler's cold still on your forearms — and standing in his cramped kitchen at the end of an Anchorage shift, you already know this one was a mistake. Everything is a reach. The shelf. The register. Your own damn life, from what the flashes gave you before you stopped letting them in — a mother's rosary, a rent notice, a man's voice on the phone that made this body's stomach fold. Cute face. Nothing behind the ribs but tired. You didn't even take off your apron. You just want the site up, the wheel spinning, gone.

You open the laptop on a counter still gritty with potting soil, and the page loads the way it always does, patient, a little reverent, the wheel already turning slow behind the paywall like it's been waiting on you specifically. You pay. You spin. You don't watch it land. You never watch it land.

The couch takes your weight before you know it's a couch. Cushions gone soft in the shape of someone else's evenings. A remote loose in a hand that is suddenly too big for the last hand you had, knuckles thick, a ring cold and forgotten on the fourth finger. The room is dark except for the television doing its blue arithmetic on the wall, and on the screen something cuts — bright frame, a laugh track swelling — and you feel the spine under you straighten on its own, an old reflex answering a joke that isn't funny to you, not yet, maybe not ever. You set the remote down on the couch arm with a care that isn't yours. Somewhere behind your sternum a fact arrives without emotion: type 2, don't forget the metformin. You didn't ask for that. It came anyway.

The couch fabric is worn shiny at the armrest where a forearm has rested ten thousand nights, and touching it, you get the first flash — not a memory so much as a temperature: this exact spot, this exact slouch, decades compressed into upholstery. Then more. The tumbler on the coffee table that was always sparkling water, never scotch, because his father drank himself into a hospital bed and Walter promised himself early and kept the promise the way some men keep a grudge. The wedding band snags light from the muted TV and with it comes June — not this June, an old one, a courthouse, her hair shorter than she wanted it, both of them laughing about the paperwork because laughing was easier than saying how scared they were. Her name arrives soft and immediate: Carol. Thirty-one years married and the arguments are the same four arguments wearing different clothes, and none of them have ever been enough to leave over.

Under that, quieter, guiltier: Denise. Before Carol, a girl from Hialeah with a temper like weather, and even now, six decades in, some Tuesday afternoons his mind still walks over to her uninvited, the way you revisit a house you sold. He never told anyone that. He is not telling you either — the shirt just gives it up, sleeve by sleeve, because his hands remember buttoning this same pale blue polo this morning, unhurried, one button skipped and refastened, thinking of nothing, thinking of her for one full second and then making himself stop.

His son is in there too, grown and distant in the specific way of sons who call on birthdays and mean it, mostly. A dockworker's wage came before the pension did; there's a whole company folded into his knees, his lower back, the ache that lives behind his left hip when weather changes — and money enough now, sixty-some thousand put by, not a fortune, a floor. He doesn't drink, hasn't in decades, and the cigar box top left on the balcony rail gives you its own small flash: the taste of one after dinner, the only vice he let himself keep, smoke going up into ocean haze while neon crawled on the wet tile below.

The soles of his feet, bare against the floor, remember standing in this apartment for years — porch mornings with coffee going lukewarm, a Miami sun already loud at nine a.m., a woman's voice from another room asking if he'd taken his pill yet. He believes in something, not a church exactly, more a suspicion that the ocean outside means more than water. He was almost happy tonight, or close enough that happy didn't need naming. That's the worst of what comes through the cushions — not tragedy, just an unremarkable, entire life, and how little it was asking of anyone.

You look down. Sixty-one-year-old hands, spotted faintly, the wedding band snug the way it's been for thirty-one years, blue light sliding over the knuckles. You turn one over slow, like checking it's real, and for a second the television keeps playing its joke to a face that has already stopped watching.

"Carol," you say, to the dark, to the empty room, testing how it sits in a mouth that isn't yours yet — and it sits fine, it sits like it always has, and that's the part that unsettles you as you lift your eyes off your own hand and let them find something that isn't there, out past the screen, out past tonight, toward whenever the wanting comes back around.