Anil Kurian Mathew

You have been Efraín Leonel Barrera for two minutes, and already the lathe is in your wrists. You stand in a machine shop in Atlanta with the afternoon coming flat through the high windows. The coolant smell is in your beard. A part is spinning down to tolerance under your palm. It is a good body, thick through the middle, with a left knee that talks when you shift. It does everything you ask. That is the trouble. You asked it for nothing today, and it gave you nothing you wanted. Some itch you won't name has sent you back to the page with the wheel on it. You pay, you spin, and the shop goes out like a pulled plug.

Now you are standing, and a keyboard is under your fingers.

The air is cold and dry. A cursor blinks in a line of code you did not write. The rhythm breaks once. Your right hand hits a wrong key, and you stop. You do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though this is a job that has not needed checking in years.

Past the glass is a strip-mall lot with white cars baking in the light. The floor is hard under your arches. There is a small ache low in the back from standing, and the shoulders are narrow and tight. You are short, and the monitors sit a little high for you. Then the first thing you touch is the hoodie, and the sleeve brings the morning.

It is a dark house, with his wife's back turned in the bed. He pulls the gray tee off the chair, and it is soft from a hundred washes. The hoodie comes next, left arm and then right, over the ink he got at twenty-two. Her mother's rosary hung in the church that day, and he came out with the cross and the praying hands burning under plastic wrap. He zips the hoodie halfway because the office freezes everyone. In the next room his daughter is breathing. Her brother has kicked his blanket off, and he fixes it without waking him. The feeling is tenderness, and under it a tired arithmetic of money. There is a little put away, never enough, and he checks it like a wound.

The coffee cup is cold against your fingertips. A flash comes up from it: a night in the car outside the hospital, the second child coming, and him reciting the Hail Mary in his head while a bad deploy burned on his phone. The headphones hang warm on your neck. A song he plays when the code will not behave rises up in them, and with it a small private shame. He has never told anyone how often he is afraid of being found out as ordinary.

The wedding band turns on your left hand. You feel the groove in the skin it has made over fifteen years.

You lift the right hand off the keys and turn it over. The ink runs up the forearm, and the hand is strange, brown and quick, with a thumb that wants to hover over the space bar. You look up at the glass and your reflection looks back.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is not yours yet. "Hello, Anil."

The cursor blinks. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.