Andrés Colima

Marcus Threadgill's office smells like burnt coffee and the particular staleness of carpet nobody has replaced since the Clinton administration. You have been him for four minutes. You know this because the clock on his desk says so, brass and ugly, a gift from a firm anniversary he doesn't remember caring about. His hand — bald knuckles, liver spot starting at the wrist, the burn scar shining under the desk lamp like a bad varnish job — is still on the phone he just hung up on a client who wanted to talk about a deposition that isn't for weeks. You feel his heart doing something slow and unimpressed. Fifty-six years old and every room he walks into already bores him before he's finished walking into it. You know this specifically, immediately, the way you know all of them a little, in the seconds after — a bleed-through that fades by morning. It isn't dislike exactly. It's that the body is fine and the life in it is a rerun you've already seen twice. You spun thirty-four times to stop being tired of things and here you are, four minutes into thirty-four, tired again already, phone still warm under his hand.

You open the laptop. The site loads the way it always does, plain as a tax form, the wheel sitting there patient and stupid and full of everyone. You do not think about it as a decision. You think about it the way Marcus's hand is already picking at a cuticle he doesn't feel, an old habit worn into muscle memory that isn't yours and isn't quite his attention either. You spin.

—

The stumble isn't yours. Two steps of it, someone else's balance caught and recovered before you're even fully arrived, and then you're running. Cold air first — that's the whole world for a second, cold air scraping down a throat that is not Marcus's throat, younger, cleaner, no cigarette-and-coffee coating to it, just dawn going into lungs that actually want it. Concrete under feet that know exactly how hard to hit it. A watch buzzes against your left wrist, some pace alert, a number with no history behind it as far as you're concerned, though the wrist under it seems to disagree, seems to expect the buzz, seems almost bored by it. Earbuds feeding you a song mid-verse. A canal fence ticks by, chain-link, dead orange light coming up over a concrete channel with no water in it. Your — his — breath is showing in the air. You are eighteen years old in a body that runs like it has never once had to think about running, and for one full second before anything else arrives, that is the entire fact of existing: cold, moving, alive, easy.

—

The tank top is damp at the small of the back, sweat-glued, and that's the first door: a locker room, months back, peeling it off after a summer shift, the particular ache of standing eight hours on a tile floor easing out of his lower back as the shirt comes away from his skin. That ache lives here permanently, low-grade, a floor he stands on rather than pain exactly. His body is good at this — the running, the standing, the kneeling — good the unglamorous way a young laborer's body is good, muscle put there by use and not by mirrors.

The earbud cord brushes his jaw and gives you his mother's kitchen, a Tuesday like this one but years younger, her turning his chin with two fingers to look at the patch of pale skin creeping along his hairline the summer he was fourteen and it started, and her saying, not unkindly, mijo, it's just skin, like that settled something for her that took longer to settle for him. You feel the specific loneliness of being stared at in a school hallway, then the specific relief of a girl in tenth grade tracing the back of his hand with one finger, following a white patch like a coastline, saying it's like a map, and something in his chest unlocking a degree that year and staying unlocked since.

The watch face lights again — 4.0 mi — and under that number is a whole discipline: a man who took up running because a coworker mocked his gut once, offhand, forgotten by the coworker within the hour and never forgotten by him, and eighteen months of dawns on this same canal path paying that comment back in full and then some. He runs before locksmith work because the work is knees and forearms and stillness, kneeling at storefront gates with a cylinder in his palm feeling for the give, and a body needs to move somewhere or it goes stiff by thirty, and he has seen what thirty looks like on the men he apprenticed under.

His back — you feel it now, the weight of ink he can't see, only remembers getting: an American-traditional piece laid down across two winters, a rose and a dagger and something with wings, chosen slow, session by session, money that came out of tip jars and slow weeks, because it felt like the first thing in his life that was entirely his decision and nobody else's. The lines are bold. The color's already fading a little at the edges, the way traditional work always fades, and he likes that better than he'd admit — likes that it's going to look like it's been lived in.

The tank top's waistband gives you this morning, specifically: pulling it on in a courtyard apartment with dry palms outside the window, the fronds scraping in a wind that never really cools anything, sitting on the edge of a mattress lacing his shoes with the automatic, half-asleep economy of someone who's done it four hundred dawns running, keys — storefront keys, his own key, a coworker's spare — already looped through a belt clip from the day job, forgotten there overnight, jingling faintly as he stood.

He is single, has been for a while, without much story behind it — a couple of names that didn't take, nobody he thinks about lying awake. He drinks on a Friday now and then, nothing during the week, never smoked, never saw the appeal. He is, by every measure that would go on a form, unremarkable: rent covered, savings thin, nothing that would make a stranger's jaw drop if they read his bank statement. What he has instead is this — legs eating up a mile like it's nothing, lungs that work, a mother who touched his face once and called it a map, ink he chose himself lying quiet under a shirt, and a body that, whatever else is true of the life stapled to it, feels extraordinary to be inside of.

—

You slow without meaning to, and look down.

The hand in front of your face is wrong in the best way — young, no burn scar, no liver spot, a scatter of pale unmarked skin across brown knuckles like light thrown on water — and you turn it over once, slow, watching the patches shift with the tendons underneath, marveling at a hand that has never once had cause to feel old.

You lift your eyes to the black glass of the watch, catching your own reflection in it for half a second before it goes back to numbers, and you say, out loud, to no one on the empty canal path, breath still showing white in the cold:

"Okay. Okay — this one I'm keeping for a bit."

The watch buzzes again. You don't check how long "a bit" ends up being. Nobody ever does.