Alfredo Gil Menchaca

You are leaving Lorenzo Ibáñez, and he has been yours for less than a minute. His beard is still unfamiliar on your jaw. His stocker's shoulders ache from a shift you never worked. You sit on the edge of his cot with the page open on his phone, and the wheel waits.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you would not say aloud. He was a body that worked, and you stood in his kitchen at the hour before the day starts and found you were already hungry for the next one. So you press.

Light. A drop with no floor under it.

Then weight. It is a great deal of weight, all of it pressed into a mattress, and the face is mashed sideways into a pillow. His breath had been ragged and now it is even, because you have evened it. One arm hangs off the bed, and the carpet's rough nap brushes the knuckles. You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest, and the body goes along with you as though it had been waiting. Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket.

The pillowcase is cool under your cheek, and the memory comes through it. It is a single pillow he has kept for eleven years because the new ones feel wrong. He bought it the week after the divorce that was not a divorce, only a woman named Teresa leaving, quietly and politely, over a long spring. You feel the shame of how little he fought. Your jaw is clenched. You find it in your teeth, a grinding that is his habit and not yours. You let go and it comes back.

The plaid pants are soft with washing. They give you a Sunday, the pants pulled on in a hurry before Mass, his mother's voice in the hall. He is not a believer anymore in the way he was, but he still crosses himself passing a church, and your right hand twitches toward it.

The sheets smell of him, of detergent and the sweetish smoke of a vape. His thumb finds the edge of the nightstand and a memory of the vape arrives, the first one, the way it replaced the last cigarette. After that comes the cold, clear fact of the drinking he gave up. He was sober three years, then four, and it was not a miracle. It was a decision, made every morning, and he made it standing at that same window.

Under the shirt, his belly rises and falls, heavy and warm. His lower back aches in the old way. His nose, broken at nineteen against a door frame in a fight that was nothing, sits slightly crooked on his face, and when you breathe through it the left side whistles faintly. The tight faded sides of his hair are rough on the pillow. The day waiting for him is a glass office with the door open, other people's problems, a badge on a clip. He is good at it. He is careful and tired. Somewhere there is a little money, tucked away, that he checks like a pulse.

You lift your hands from your chest and hold them up in the streetlight. They are broad, with square nails, and the palms are soft except for a hard ridge at the base of the fingers. They are not yours. Nothing of yours is in them. You turn them over, and then over again.

You look up and say into the dark, low, in a voice that is slightly rough from sleep, "Alfredo." It is just to hear it.

The ceiling does not answer. Your jaw is clenched again. You wonder how long you get with him, whether the wanting will come back by noon, or by the time the light changes, or never.