Adrián Lozano

You are standing in Samir Haddadin's kitchen in the dark, and you have been him for less than a minute. His feet are small on the cold tile. His belly sits against the counter edge. Your thumb finds the broken place in his nose and presses it, the way he must have a thousand times, and nothing comes back, because you are touching only him and he has given you nothing yet.

Something sent you back. It was the stool in the stockroom, the one he sat on at the end of every shift. When you took him there was a ladder, a high shelf, a box of winter coats, and a body that could not reach any of it. Five foot three. You have been tall. You have been quick. You reached and reached and he was not built for it, and the wanting came back like a tooth. So the phone is in his hand and the wheel is on the screen.

You spin.

The cold comes first, a clean knife of it down the throat. Then your feet are hitting ground, the left already planted, the right swinging through. A canal on your left, grey and steaming. A chain-link fence ticking past. Your breath goes out ahead of you in a rag of white. A stumble starts and never lands, and the stride resumes on the other foot, arms dropping lower, head holding still.

Your lungs are working at a pace he has settled into, burning in the way that means he has done this a long time. There is a small bud in one ear and a drum-loop in it. On your wrist a watch buzzes against the bone, a split you have no record of him holding. Mile four.

You slow to a walk, because you can.

The jacket is the first thing that talks. Its collar is zipped to the chin and rubs the stubble on his jaw, and with it comes a Sunday: his wife holding the jacket out in a store and saying *you'll actually wear this one*, and his own pleasure at being known that well. The warmth of it is real. It is not yours.

The sweat under the sleeves turns cold. His shoulders ache, a good ache, the earned kind. His knees are thirty-five years old and say so. The ground is cracked asphalt under gray shoes, and through the soles comes another morning: the same path in August, his daughter on a small bike, his hand on the back of the seat, letting go without telling her. She rode twenty feet before she noticed. The pride in his chest was so huge it frightened him.

Your hand goes to your pocket and finds a pack of cigarettes, soft and crushed. The cellophane crackles and a whole shame arrives. A pack a day. He runs four miles so he can smoke and then he smokes so he can face the office. He told his wife he quit in March. He hides them in the car's door pocket, and the lie sits under his ribs like a stone. Drink he did quit. That one he is proud of, and it cost him a year he does not go back to.

The knuckles are next. Your fingers curl without being asked, and the thumb pushes, and they crack, one, two, three, a thing his hands do alone. It comes with a desk under a buzzing light, a strip-mall office, two guest chairs, and a stack of policies he sells to people who cannot afford them. Under that, a ledger in his head, red, deep, tens of thousands down, a number he does not say aloud even to himself. He lies awake and sums it.

Then the ring. The band is plain and a little loose in the cold. Turn it and there is a woman at the church door, light through the windows, his mother crying in the second pew, and the priest's dry voice. He still crosses himself when he passes a church. He does it now, without meaning to, at a dark brick building across the water. Another woman comes behind the first, older, a girl he loved at twenty-two, laughing in a car. He still has her number. He has never used it. That is the thing nobody knows.

The eyebrow itches, and you touch the scar through it. A handlebar, a driveway, a brother shouting. He was nine and did not cry.

You stop at the fence. The water steams. You hold your hands out in the white light, and they are broad and cold and not yours, the ring crooked on the left, the knuckles red. You turn them over. Palms, creases, a callus at the base of the fingers from something he lifts.

Then you look up, and the canal is very bright.

"Okay, Adrián," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Let's see what you were."

Somewhere under the breath is the question, already warming. How long does he hold? When does the wanting come back, and will you still be this man tomorrow?