Weston Kirchner

You are Marcus Deveraux for forty seconds, standing in a studio doorway with a coffee going cold in your hand and a phone lighting up with a text from a client about a kitchen remodel that will now never happen, and it is the phone that does it — the notification banner, a name you don't recognize, a life mid-sentence that isn't yours and never will be no matter how long you keep this body. You didn't spin for Marcus. Marcus is what the wheel gave you when you wanted out of the last one, quick, before you'd even decided what you wanted instead. Forty seconds in, holding his coffee, wearing his gap-toothed almost-smile like borrowed shoes, you already know: this isn't it either. The itch under the itch. You set the coffee down on nothing — on air, because your hand is already someone else's problem — and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, because the wheel is the only place the itch ever quiets, even for a second, even for free.

You are on your knees.

The bedspread is right there, close, a hand's width from your face, and your hands are laced together loose in front of you like they forgot what they were doing halfway through doing it. There's a clock on the nightstand, red digits, and a window with the blinds throwing bars of late light across a dresser that doesn't match anything else in the room. Your knees are on carpet. There's a t-shirt against your back, soft from washing, too many washings. You were rising — you can feel the half-motion still in the thighs, the shift of weight that didn't finish — and now you're not. You're down again. Forehead wants to go to the bedspread and it does.

The shirt gives it first, because the shirt is what's touching you most and touch is the door. Gray, thin at the collar, his girlfriend's detergent — not yours, not anymore, not ever, but it arrives as his, that green smell, and with it a Tuesday: her elbow in the ribs, the dryer buzzer, a joke about how he wears it eleven times before she wins the fight to wash it. Weston. The name comes with the shirt, oddly, the way a name comes when someone's said it to you fondly a thousand times — Wes, get up, Wes, the girls are already dressed and you're still on the floor praying about a Craigslist ad — and you feel the fondness folded into it even though she isn't in the room.

The knees know the carpet. Faded green, the good pile worn to nothing in a track between bed and door. He's knelt here most evenings for a year, not the deep kind of praying, not the kind with real fear in it, more like checking in, more like a man leaving a note on a fridge for somebody who might not even read it — Lord, whatever, if you're gonna do something about the job thing, tonight'd be good. He gets to the amen too early most nights. Tonight too. There'd been a laugh building in his chest at his own halfheartedness, the smile already starting, weight already coming up onto his heels —

The tattoo on his arm gives you the date before it gives you the name, the ink still faintly raised under your fingers when your knuckles brush it: Liam, 11.11.21. A delivery room that smelled like bleach and fear-sweat, a nurse's voice going up at the end of a sentence, the specific terror of a first kid, the way his hand had shaken holding the pen at the tattoo shop three weeks later like getting it wrong would matter. There's a second kid too, younger, a name that comes blurrier, more recent, less worn into him yet — a girl, diapers still, a 3 a.m. that never fully leaves a man's body. Two kids and a girlfriend named — the earring gives you this, small silver hoop, her gift, three Christmases back — Dana. Not the one who got away. The one who got away is older in him, further back, a name that surfaces with an ache that has nothing to do with anger: Ashley, a girl from a youth group in Amarillo, a decision he made at twenty that he still turns over some nights like a stone in a pocket, wondering what the other version of his life would've weighed.

The job listings are still open on a laptop in the kitchen, cold coffee rings on the table from mornings like this one going back months — he doesn't drink coffee himself, never took to it, but he keeps a pot going for Dana and the smell of it is just the smell of morning now, no different from the desert light coming white through the blinds. No drink, ever, not since he watched what it did to his own dad, a fact so old in him it isn't even a decision anymore, just a shape his life grew around. His knuckles crack without him telling them to — one hand, then the other, a habit older than the beard, older than the marriage he almost had, older than El Paso. The beard itself is a kind of decision too, something he grew out after he lost the framing job, a way of having one thing that was still growing when everything else had stalled.

The heterochromia he forgets about until strangers don't. Blue in one, brown in the other, and Dana calls it his one interesting feature, teasing, and he always says back she married a boring man with mismatched eyes, ha ha, and means it more than she knows.

You look at your hands. Laced together, blond hair on the backs of them catching the window light, a tan line, calluses gone soft from months without framing work, knuckles that want cracking. You crack them, both hands, out of a habit that isn't yours yet and already is.

You lift your head off the bedspread.

"Amen," you say, out loud, to the empty room, a beat late — finishing a prayer somebody else started, not sure yet if you mean it or if you're just trying the shape of his voice in your mouth.