Wesley Cordero

Kenny Odom's hands are heavy and freckled and they smell like cutting oil even freshly washed, and you have had them for three minutes and you already know they are not going to be enough for the rest of a life. The shift hasn't started. Kenny stands in his own kitchen in a bathrobe he doesn't remember choosing, coffee going cold, the lathe still hours off, and you feel the specific, itchy wrongness of a body you didn't earn and don't especially want, in a town you didn't choose either, at an hour that belongs to a man who has to be at a machine shop by seven. Three minutes was long enough to know his knees ache on concrete and his back has a permanent list to the left. It was long enough to be bored of him. You did not spin this thing six times to end up standing in a Las Vegas kitchen being a bald, decent, tired stranger with freckles. So you open the site again on his phone, the wheel already spinning in your head before it spins on the screen, and you go.

It lands wrong-shouldered, the weight distributed differently, lighter through the chest, and for a half-second you are nowhere, and then you are sitting forward on a couch with a can gone warm in your hand and a television throwing blue light across a stucco apartment room, and a thumb — his thumb, yours now — finds the volume knob with a precision that says this body has done this ten thousand times half-asleep. The game is still going. Somewhere behind you a game had a goal you slept through; you are watching the replay of it instead, sober-still, present in a way the man whose couch this is was not, five minutes ago, drunk on nothing but exhaustion.

The shirt is the first thing. Black cotton, a day's sweat gone dry in it, and it gives you a morning — his morning, hours before this one by the clock on his wall, though your body's clock insists it's still early, still before the day, a different Monday folded against the first — pulling this same shirt off a doorknob in a bedroom with the blinds already too bright, the bee suit hanging white and gone gray at the cuffs on a hook by the door. He dressed slow that morning. Head hurting already, the kind of migraine that sits behind the left eye like a coal, and he'd stood there letting the shirt settle before he could face the jeans, the boots, the long drive out to the yard where the hives were stacked eight high and the smoker needed lighting before the sun got mean.

The jeans against your legs bring the calluses up through the memory of themselves — his palms, thick along the base of the fingers, a burn scar he doesn't have but should from a lit smoker tipped once, except he doesn't, the facts are clean there, just weather and work and ten years of hive tool and glove leather. His hands know propolis by smell before they know it by sight. They know the particular shudder of ten thousand bees deciding, together, whether today is a calm day. He loves them with an attention he has never once loved a person with, not entirely fairly, and he knows that about himself and has stopped apologizing for it.

The couch cushion under you gives up the apartment itself — the courtyard outside with its dry palms clacking in whatever wind gets down between the buildings, late sun coming in gold and used-up through the blinds most evenings, this one included, until sleep took him before the second half even started. A woman's voice comes with it, warm, half a joke about the score, texted hours ago and not yet answered — Marisol, girlfriend, eight months in, easy in a way his last one wasn't. The last one is there too, quieter, a name that still catches — Dana — and a kid between them, four years old, weekends, a booster seat in the truck that smells like honey no matter how many times he vacuums it.

The can in your hand is warm and mostly full, and his mouth remembers being open, snoring, unglamorous, unwatched. His chin — you feel it before you think it, the cleft in it, the one thing anyone ever says about his face at a bar — juts forward slightly in sleep, always has, his mother used to reach over and close his jaw for him at family dinners when he was young and it fell open watching TV, and some things a body keeps doing at thirty-three that it did at nine. His head aches faintly now, low-grade, a Monday-morning promise of worse. He hasn't had a drink in four years and doesn't miss it except in moments exactly like this one, loose and unwound in front of a game, when a beer used to be the whole point and now the can in his hand is just a can, bought out of habit and left mostly undrunk.

You look at your hand. It's not Kenny's — no freckles, no permanent list — this one is browned at the knuckle, nicked twice along the thumb in scars too old to sting, and when you turn it over the palm has a callus map you didn't build and don't yet fully own. Overhead the TV throws its second replay, the crowd roaring at a shot nobody in this room saw the first time.

"Huh," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you almost believe it's wonder at the play.