Alberto Quintanilla

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember, and tonight, which is the middle of a Saturday morning and nothing like a night, you are at a screen with nothing on. You have read the threads at two in the morning. You have watched every film where someone wakes up in a stranger's skin. Now there is a page with a wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin, and you do not believe it.

Then you are running.

Cold in the lungs. Breath going out white. Brick under the shoes, a canal at your left shoulder, black water, a lamp throwing orange up a wall. Your stride breaks for two steps, a stumble that never lands, and you come down on the other foot with your arms lower and your head still. The watch on your wrist buzzes a split it has no record of him ever holding.

He does not know. There is nothing left of him in here to know.

The earbuds are in. A voice is talking about gears. The jacket whispers at the elbows, and the zip, cold against the chin, opens something. A Thursday, years back: this jacket bought in a shop on the Holloway Road because his wife said he looked like a man who had given up, running in that grey thing. He was fifty-six and stung, and he bought it anyway, and she laughed in the doorway of the shop, and the laugh is warm in your chest, his warmth, not yours.

The watch. Under your thumb, the strap's worn notch. He started running the winter he turned sixty, after the doctor said a number, and the first mile was a humiliation. He stood bent over by a postbox on his own street, wheezing, in drizzle, glad nobody saw. Now it is mile four and the legs know the work. The calves are tight and stubborn. The knees complain a little, politely. The heart goes steady, an engine he tuned himself.

The ring, the plain band, shifts on a damp finger. Her name nearly comes, then the kitchen: her bare feet on cold tile, the kettle, a quiet that took thirty years to build and that he loves without ever saying so. There are no children. There was a long grief about that once, set down now like a tool on a bench. Under it, something he does not tell people at the lab: a small altar on a windowsill, a candle, a dish of salt, a stone. He lights it at the solstice and feels foolish and does it anyway. He is an engineer who measures to the hundredth of a millimetre, and he lights candles to the turning year.

Your fingertips remember calipers. They remember the machine on the bench waiting for Monday, half-assembled, a bracket that will not seat. His hands already know how to fix it. He has not had a drink in nine years and does not miss it. The hair is stiff with gel, spiked up over gray he dyes dark each month and tells no one. The jaw is smooth, shaved before he left in the dark of the bathroom, the razor's small cold drag along it.

He is not tall. The ground is close and the world sits at a height you did not choose. You have never been so exactly in a place.

You slow. The watch buzzes again. You lift your hand into the lamplight and turn it over, the ring, the lines, the knuckles that are not yours and are. Then you look up, into the glass of the morning, and say it aloud, in his voice, low and a little hoarse:

"Well. Hello."

And underneath, already, the quiet question: how long. Whether the wanting comes back in an hour, or a year, or whether tomorrow you are still him.