Adrián Soto

You are at the screen, and it is the middle of an ordinary Saturday, the kind with nothing in it. You have scrolled until the scrolling stopped meaning anything. For as long as you can remember you have wanted this: the films, the stories, the threads at two in the morning about waking up as somebody else. Now there is a page with a wheel on it, and you pay, and you don't believe it, and you spin.

Then you are kneeling.

The carpet is rough under both knees, and the edge of the mattress presses into your forearms. Your breath is halfway out of a laugh. You were standing up, and you stopped, and you came back down. Your forehead is on a bedspread that smells of detergent and sleep. The room is dark. A red clock glows at the edge of your sight, and it says 3:17.

Nobody is awake anywhere. A man who manages a store before it opens keeps these hours, and he was praying at the wrong end of the night with his eyes open on a clock.

The memories come through the things you touch. The cotton shirt against your back is soft, worn thin at the collar, and it gives you a laugh in a kitchen. He bought it three to a pack, and he is the kind of man who does that. The bedspread under your hands gives you a smaller prayer, one he says every night, never very seriously: *Hail Mary, keep the store from flooding, keep my knees.* Your knees ache. The weight of him sits low and warm, a heavy, solid body, and the carpet's pattern presses into his shins. The plaid pajama cloth gives you a Sunday. A church with a fan turning slowly. A woman's hand on his neck when he was small, pushing him gently toward the pew. It is his feeling, not yours: shame, and love, and being fed.

Your fingers find his keys on the nightstand's edge, a heavy ring, and the brass is cold. A flash comes of the back door at work, the pallets stacked and waiting. His shoulders know the cutting, the box knife drawn down the shrink wrap, the cardboard folded flat. Your hands already know how. Then Nashville comes up from the window: neon bleeding into an alley, a guitar case in the corner he never learned to play past three chords, and the loneliness of loving nobody in particular. Stubble rasps against your knuckle when you rub your jaw.

He said amen early because he was tired and a little ashamed to be asking. That is the last of him, and it is warm, and it fades like a coin sinking.

You lift your head. You look at your hands, the thick fingers and the calluses from cardboard. You turn them over. Then you look up at the dark window, and at the face that must be in it, and you say, softly, "Amen."

Underneath it is the next spin, already asking how long this one lasts, and whether you will be him tomorrow.