Moss has carried his uncle's back pain for two years. His uncle carried it for fifteen before that, from a fall at a job site when he was forty-one. The transfer happened on a Sunday afternoon at his uncle's kitchen table. The paperwork was simple. His uncle cried a little, which surprised both of them. Then the pain was Moss's.
The thing Moss did not expect is how sourceless it feels. His own pains have origins. A knee he rolled in his twenties aches in wet weather; he can point to the afternoon it happened, the specific sound it made. The back pain is not like that. It lives in the same place a back pain would live if he had one. But there is no moment attached to it. No fall, no jar, no specific weight. He has all the pain and none of the story.
His uncle says he feels twenty years younger. They have coffee sometimes. His uncle moves easily, reaches for things, stands up without preparation. Moss is glad for this. He told his uncle he was glad for it, and he meant it, and he has continued to mean it in the time since.
The pain cannot be returned. That is part of the agreement, part of how transfer works: once given, it belongs to whoever holds it. Moss can transfer it on if he wants to. He has not decided about this. He knows people who transfer repeatedly, moving pain along networks of receivers. He finds this unsettling in a way he has not fully examined.
On a Tuesday in March he is lifting boxes in the back room of the shop where he works. The pain flares at a particular angle, the same angle it always flares at, the angle at which his uncle presumably learned not to twist. He puts the box down. He straightens.
The pain is already there when he wakes up in the morning and already there when he goes to sleep. It was there before him, in another body, in a different life. He thinks about this sometimes, that the pain has a longer history in the world than he and his uncle's relationship does. That it was present before he knew his uncle well enough to accept it from him.
He adjusts his posture. He picks the box back up.