Wendell Marsh

The shop floor smells like cutting oil and Gary Kaminski's lower back is a live wire from collarbone to hip. Eighteen minutes into a shift that will run eight more hours, and you are standing at his lathe wearing his dad-bod and his blond hair gone dark with sweat under a bump cap, and you already know you are done with him. It isn't the ache, though the ache is real. It's that nothing in this body wants anything. Gary clocks in, clocks out, watches the game, loves his wife in a tired unhurried way that isn't yours to keep living. You've had less than a minute of him being fully awake before boredom set its hook. You wipe your hands on a rag that is not yours, walk to the break room, thumb open the site on a phone that is not yours either, and spin.

The world tips sideways without moving.

You are sitting forward on a couch that smells like dust and old rain, and the light through the blinds is flat and white and wrong for evening — noon light, hard and shadowless, cutting the room in half. A ballgame plays low. There's a can in your hand, warm, nearly weightless, and your thumb is already on the volume rocker of a remote, adjusting it with a small precise motion your new body knows and the beer in it does not. Second replay. You watch the runner cross and not the score bug. Somewhere behind your sternum a man's whole life is still folded up, waiting on your hands to open it.

The shirt is what starts it — not this shirt, the soft sleep shirt you're in now, but the memory arrives sideways through your own skin, through the couch cushions worn to the shape of this body's shoulders. Morning. Before the couch, before the game. A green cotton work shirt, sun-faded at the yoke, going over your head at five-forty with the grass-stain permanence already worked into the cuffs no matter how many times Amina washes it. Steel toes, laced twice because the left one won't hold a bow. The mower waiting under the lights at the field, dew still on the infield tarp, and the particular quiet of a ballpark before anyone else is alive in the town — you love that quiet the way some men love church, and some part of you, the part that still faces east five times before this hour, thinks maybe it's the same thing, an emptiness that isn't empty.

Wendell. The name comes with the mole, oddly, a small itch high on the cheek that his own fingers go to sometimes without asking. Forty-three years cut into wheat country. He never drinks — the can in your hand isn't beer, it's some sugar-free soda his cardiologist would still frown at, and his blood pressure sits behind his eyes like weather that never breaks. He vapes out behind the maintenance shed on breaks, three or four pulls, never in front of the guys from the mosque an hour east, never in front of his daughter. His hands — God, his hands — can't hold still even now, thumb worrying the tab of the can, and you feel how that restlessness has always been there, drumming on steering wheels, tapping fence rails, a motor that never fully idles.

There's a night that comes up hard and complete: an ex-girlfriend, Denise, twenty years gone, and the ache of her isn't romantic anymore so much as a door he still checks is locked. Then his wedding, the band on his left hand plain and a little loose now, Amina's laugh under a string of lights at her cousin's place in Wichita, the year he almost lost the groundskeeping job when the district cut the budget and she took a second shift at the clinic without complaint. His daughter, seven, asleep down the hall right now, this exact hour, home sick from school, which is the only reason he's on this couch at midday instead of on the mower — thunderheads stacking black over cut stubble outside, the game a mercy while she sleeps.

He fell asleep to it, mouth open, can gone warm in a hand too tired to set it down. He never felt himself go under. He will never feel himself come back different.

You look down at the can, at the ring on the fourth finger, at a hand that will not stop moving even doing nothing.

"Bottom of the sixth," you say, out loud, to no one, testing the voice, and it isn't a decision about how long you'll stay — it's just a man's mouth finding out it still works, while somewhere a wheel keeps spinning whether you touch it again in an hour or a year.