Arjun Malhotra

Daniel Wozniak's back is the first thing to go wrong, and it goes wrong at the exact moment I decide. Fifty-seven years in a spine, and for the last forty minutes of a shift it has been a bent nail. The scanner on my wrist chirps. Aisle 14, a case of pet food, sixty pounds, and my knees tell me what they think of that. I lift it anyway and set it on the pallet. The nose he broke at nineteen whistles when I breathe.

I did not spin because of the back. I spun because at the break room table a man named Teddy asked if I wanted to see pictures of his granddaughter, and I said yes in Daniel's flat voice, and I looked at the phone and felt nothing. Daniel knew her name. It came up through the phone case, warm, a flash of his own daughter at six. It was a nice flash. It was his. I stood there holding a stranger's love like a coat that does not fit, and the wheel was already open in my head.

Pay. Spin.

The warehouse is gone. No travel. Sun on my face, a dry papery rattle of palms, and my weight is on the left foot while my right hand turns over in the air, mid-gesture, fingers half closed around nothing. My leg is bouncing. I did not tell it to. It just goes, heel up and down, a small engine under the knee.

My back doesn't hurt. I almost laugh at that.

The hoodie is the first thing I touch, my cuff dragging against my wrist, and it comes up through the cotton: a Vancouver apartment, a cousin's, a gray morning, the sleeves pulled over his hands because he was cold and homesick and eighteen. The cousin handed him the hoodie as a joke, a school he never attended. He kept wearing it because it smelled like somebody's house. This morning he pulled it over a green t-shirt, head through first, then the left arm, the right, and he stood at a mirror and rubbed his jaw, smooth from a razor, and pressed his thumb into the cleft of his chin, a habit, checking it was all there.

The backpack strap bites my shoulder. Memory: the zipper that sticks, the laptop he saved eight months for, a secondhand machine bought with tutoring money. Nineteen dollars in his account today. He knows that number like a pulse.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. A night, a bar on Sawtelle, three drinks past sensible, a friend laughing so hard he held a wall. Big night, once or twice a month, never more. He liked the next morning's quiet.

Concrete through the soles of the canvas shoes. A courtyard, his courtyard, the rent due in nine days. His mother's voice on a call, saying beta, are you eating? Cacti in the pots, which he waters because no one else will. He believes the universe is listening, loosely, in a way he would never say in a classroom.

Twenty-four years and no ache. The air goes all the way down.

I lift my hand, and look at it. Smooth, brown, unmarked, quick. It closes. It is mine and it is a stranger's, and the leg keeps bouncing underneath.

I look up and say, "Okay. Hi, Arjun."

Then I wait, the way you wait on a platform, to see how long this one holds, and whether the wanting is already somewhere behind the sun.