Armin Rostami

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember, and tonight it is for sale.

It is early, before the day has properly started, and you have been scrolling in the dull gray of a Thursday with nothing on. You have read the threads, watched the films, and lain awake wondering what it would be to wake up as somebody else. Then the page: a wheel, a price, a button. You do not believe it. You pay anyway, and you spin.

Light comes down in flat panels from the ceiling. You are standing up. There is a knife in your right hand and your weight is on one hip, one foot crossed over the other. The air is warm and smells of onion and steel and bleach. The window to your left is full of hard afternoon sun, which is strange. Someone is working a night here, or a day that feels like night, and it is already the middle of it. The blade has just come down and gone wrong. It hit the board a half-beat off. You do it again, slowly, and it goes right. Then ten more, each one checked, on a job this body has not had to check in years.

The glove on your left hand is cold mesh, a chain of tiny rings that gives against your knuckles. Something opens: his father's cousin, a restaurant in Tehran that was never his, and the first time somebody handed him a knife and said *faster* instead of *careful*. It comes with a flat tiredness that is not yours.

The apron strings are tied at the small of your back, a double knot. You feel the morning he tied them. A bathroom light, a wife's voice through the wall, the cheap soap. He put the gray shirt on inside out and turned it in the hall because she laughed. She laughed at him easily. That is the warmest thing in him, and it floods up through your chest.

The ring on your left hand is pressed under the mesh. A plain band, worn thin. Under it a different weight: a girl before her, a recent one, a text he has not answered in nine days. His thumb knows to turn the ring when he thinks of it. You turn it. A small, ugly guilt, nothing he has told anyone.

Under your feet the floor is greasy tile and the black shoes are stiff at the heel. Your calves ache with the long hours. Your back is tight and your shoulders are young and strong. The hair against your neck is too long and the hairnet pinches it. Your jaw is smooth and cool. You are twenty-four and there is rent. The money is always almost enough. The container of diced celery under the blade is nearly full, and you know, without being told, what the chef will say if it is not.

You lift your right hand and look at it. The knuckles, the thin gold, the faint ache of the grip. You turn it over, and then you look up.

"Okay," you say, quietly, to nobody. "Okay. This is real."

Behind the word the question is already waiting, patient as a held breath: how long. Whether the wanting comes back in an hour, or never, or while you are still learning where he keeps his keys.