Danilo Fuentes

Three minutes in Gary Trombetta and already the itch is back.

You're standing in his super's apartment in the dark, Atlanta humming outside through a window unit that rattles like it's dying, and you can feel his gut pushing against the waistband, his bald scalp cold under the ceiling fan, dimples you didn't earn sitting there on a face you didn't choose. It's the middle of the night and everyone in this building is asleep except you, and that's the whole problem — there is nothing to do in Gary. There was nothing to do in the last one either, or the one before, and you spun through both of them the way you're about to spin through him, because a body that only stands there being somebody is a body you've already used up. You don't even remember spinning yourself into Gary. You remember deciding to do it again, three minutes ago, in a life that was already someone else's, and that's reason enough — the wanting doesn't wait for morning.

You open vessel.cards on a dying man's phone. You pay. You spin.

The lamp is the first thing — a hot yellow cone of it, close to your face, and under it a shriveled brown thing on a card table that your hand is already closing around. One shrunken finger curls in against your palm, then another, smooth and practiced, like you've done this before, though you never have. Your mouth was open. It closes. Your shoulders, which were hunched forward toward the lamp like a man begging something, drop down easy, and you turn the paw over in the light the way you'd check a level, a stud finder, something with a use. Metal folding chair under you. Concrete floor under boots that have dried mud in the tread. A shirt on your back, dark and soft with wear, and a smell coming off it of sunscreen and diesel and someone else's sweat.

The shirt gives you the morning first — not this morning, a Tuesday morning, hot already at six, him pulling this same shirt off a doorknob in a one-bedroom off SW 8th where the AC only works in the window unit over the stove. Sleeve, then sleeve. He didn't think about it. He never thinks about clothes, he thinks about whether the excavator's hydraulic line held overnight, whether Hector remembered the shoring for the trench on 41st, whether his youngest's recital is Thursday or Friday and whether he can leave the site early either way. His ex-wife's name comes up through the collar somehow, through the smell of fabric softener she used to buy that he still buys because he never learned another brand — Marisol, three years gone, no venom left in it, just a Sunday-morning tiredness whenever her name crosses him. Two kids. A boy who wants sneakers Danilo can't justify. A girl who still calls him Papi like she's six.

The paw in your hand opens more — not memory exactly, just his hands' habit, the calluses along the base of the fingers thick as a coin, the ache low in the right shoulder that's been there two years and isn't going anywhere, forty-five years old and every one of them in his knees when he kneels to check grade. He'd been in this room three days now on some story he told his cousin about, a card table under a bare bulb in a storage unit off the tourist strip where a guy named Pello showed him this thing and said wish smart, and Danilo, half-laughing, half not, had said the words out loud because it costs nothing to say them.

You feel, through his back against the chair, the ink there — a crest between his shoulder blades, edges of it showing at the collar, a team he's followed since he was nine years old sitting on his tío's shoulders at a game he still talks about. You feel his jaw, tight the way it always sits when he's not paying attention to it, clenched now around nothing, around habit, around forty-five years of holding something in that was never named.

Clean-shaven this morning. He'd stood at the mirror in that apartment and dragged the razor twice over the same spot on his jaw out of nerves he didn't examine, because tonight was the wish and some part of him wanted to look right for it, like it was church.

His eyes are green, and open, and looking at the paw in the lamp.

You look down. Your hand — his hand, wide, scarred along one knuckle from a rebar cut two summers back — turns over in the light like he was already doing before you arrived, except now it's you doing it, watching the fingers uncurl and curl the way you'd test a machine before trusting it with your weight.

"—the hell was I about to wish for," you say, his voice low and a little rough, and you don't know either, and you don't need to.

Somewhere a wheel is still spinning in a bald man's empty apartment, nobody's hand on it now, and you don't think about that yet. You've got Danilo. You've got the lamp, the paw, the quiet. However long that lasts is nobody's business yet, least of all yours.