Colin Thibodeaux

You are standing in a kitchen in Eastern Kentucky, in a body that is fifty-three and five-foot-three and heavy in the gut, and the coffee in your hand has gone cold on your tongue. Ernesto Villalobos. You have been him for less than a minute by the clock on the stove. The nose that was once broken whistles on the in-breath. Stubble scrapes your palm when you rub your jaw. The hazel eyes in the dark window look back at you with no complaint.

There is nothing wrong with him. That is the trouble. A client's file is open on the table, a widow with a pension and a nephew who wants it, and you read the first line of it three times and felt nothing take hold. A man who can do this work walks around inside you, and you cannot stand how little of it you want. You wanted something that costs. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, and you let it.

Then the kitchen is gone and there is white light, and your right hand is closing a connector on a board, and the motion goes wrong. Half a second. The click is not seated. You do it again, slowly, and it seats. Then ten more, each one checked, each one a thing this body has not needed to check in years.

Your breath is shallow in a chest with some softness over it. Your feet are on a floor that is cool and hard through the soles. The sun is coming in through a wall of glass on your left, and outside a wet street is steaming, and a blue house sits on the other side of it as if it had nothing to do with any of this.

The coat comes first. The cuff is elastic and snug on your wrist, and the fabric has a faint ribbed give, and with it comes a morning: a shotgun house, one room behind another like beads on a string, and a man walking its length half awake toward the closet. He takes the striped shirt off the hook, the blue one, and does the buttons from the bottom, the way he always has, because the top one sticks. He feels fine. He feels like a man with nowhere he'd rather be, and it is almost tender how little he asks of the day. The gray trousers come next, one leg and then the other, hopping on the cold boards. The black shoes are the ones he resoled once and swore he would replace.

The lanyard lifts against your sternum and you know the badge photo, and you know he hates it. Your fingers want to drum on the edge of the stand. They do. Index, middle, ring, a little roll, and under it a night on a porch, a vape glowing in the dark, a bourbon sweating a ring into the rail, the swamp-warm air, a feeling of being a little alone and not minding. There was a woman once, for a while. It left no heat in him. What he has is a savings account he keeps looking at, and a hope about a launch window.

Your tongue finds the gap between your front teeth and presses into it. It is an old habit, and it is his.

You lift your hands off the board. They are pale, square, a little thick through the knuckle, with fine calluses along the sides of the fingers from tools. You turn them over. You look up.

"Huh," you say, and you almost laugh, in a voice that is lighter than the last one. "Okay. Let's see how long you hold."