Colin Reidy

You are standing in Tomás Ibarra's kitchen with his coffee going cold in a mug that says nothing, and you have been him for less than a minute. His stubble is rough against your palm. His weight sits low in the belly and the knees, and the chair under him complains. The spreadsheet on the laptop is a language you can read and cannot want. Four hundred rows of someone else's churn. You wanted a body that could carry something, and this one can only sit. When you stood up your breath ran out on the stairs of the thought. So you do it again. The page loads. The wheel is already turning, and you do not remember deciding.

Then the pencil is in your fingers and the line is half drawn.

Cold air, early, the kind with no sun in it yet. The tape's hook rattles against the end of a two-by-four. Your thumb is on the blade, your eye is somewhere else, and the mark you make lands wrong, a sixteenth off, a crooked little tick. Something in the hand notices before you do. It does it again, slowly, and it is right. Ten more follow, and each one you check, tape and tick and square, on a cut this body has made ten thousand times and never once doubted.

Sawdust hangs in the light of a work lamp. Your legs are light. After the last body, the lightness is almost indecent. Five foot four, and all of it tight: calves like fists, a back that wakes up when it bends, shoulders warm from work already. Under the right knee there is a dull complaint, an old one, familiar to him and not to you.

The vest first. It is stiff with dust, and the zipper pull is cold against your sternum. You know, through his hands, the sleeve of the grey shirt going on in a dark rowhouse bedroom, the careful quiet so the floor wouldn't creak. Two kids asleep down the hall, or not his this week, the schedule in his head like a sore tooth. He stood at the sink and put in a nicotine pouch, and the sting of it comes back against your gum, mint and burn. He bent for the boots. He pulled the laces hard, because loose laces on a staircase once nearly cost him an ankle.

The belt. The leather is worn into the shape of his hips. The hammer hangs on the left and your hand goes to it and finds the handle already warm. A flash comes through it: a Saturday, a small girl on his shoulders, a swing set he built crooked on purpose so it would feel homemade. Then the pliers, and another flash, thin and bitter. A kitchen. A ring set on a counter, a sound it made. Your thumb finds the pale band of skin on your finger and rubs it, and the ache arrives complete and not yours. Another woman now, newer, a recent one, her laugh in a parked truck, and the quiet after she stopped calling. He did not say it to anyone. Under it, a church pew, a hard bench, a prayer he mumbles over his own hands before a job. He has never decided whether anyone is listening.

Under your boots, the marble steps down the block, worn hollow by a hundred years of feet. He will walk them at the end of the day. Money is thin: a number in his head, small, held tight, and the rent on it.

You look at your hands. They are broad, scarred nowhere you can find, square at the nails, steady. The tape rests in the left. The pale line of the ring finger is the only soft thing on them.

You look up at the street, where the first sun is just reaching the brick, and you say it low, in his voice, which is rougher than you expected:

"Alright. Let's see what you can do."

Your thumb is still on the pale band. You do not know how long this one holds, or when the wanting will come back for you.