Danilo Reyes

The dock is cold through Ramón's boots, and that's the thing that decides it — not the ache, which is always there, but the cold, which means the loading bay doors are open on a Chicago night in the wrong direction of a shift that never ends. Forty-six years in this body and forty-five of them were not yours. You've had him less than a minute and already you know the whole shape of the complaint: a knee, a strap cutting his shoulder, a birthmark he stopped seeing in mirrors decades ago. It isn't boredom, not exactly. It's that you can feel how long this particular kind of tired takes to become permanent, and you are not interested in finding out. Somewhere behind a forklift a radio is playing something in Spanish you don't recognize, and your thumb — his thumb — is already moving toward the phone in the coat pocket, toward the site you bookmarked before you were even him.

You spin. Nine hundred and nineteen. The wheel doesn't care that it's near midnight here, doesn't care what time it is anywhere.

Rain lands on a face tipped up into it, and you're the one it lands on now.

The water is warm-ish, city-warm, New Orleans warm, and it comes down on a jaw that has no stubble on it at all — you feel that first, oddly, before you feel the feet or the hood fallen back or the bus board glowing 3 MIN somewhere over the shoulder that used to belong to nobody you know. A body one hood-width shorter than the last one. A body standing in runoff like it's the first rain in a year.

The forearm is wet where it hangs at your side, and the tattoo on it — a woman's face, black and gray, realism, someone's mother rendered in ink so careful it must have cost him a month's wages — gives you the first flash before you've even decided to reach for anything: a chair in a shop on Louisiana Avenue, a buzzing needle, his own voice saying *make her eyes look like she's about to say something.* Grief in it, old and settled, like furniture you've stopped noticing is there.

The jeans against your legs are stiff with sawdust that didn't wash out last night, and through them comes a slab of concrete still curing, the smell of fresh-cut pine, a nail gun's hose looped over one shoulder that isn't there right now but the muscle remembers the weight of it anyway — his hands know a hundred things without asking him, how to set a stud plumb by feel, how to walk a joist sixteen feet up without looking down, and none of that is fear, all of that is competence, worn in so deep it survives even this.

The wedding band is cold and thin on the left hand, and that's the one that opens all the way: a kitchen with the window unit rattling, a woman laughing with her hand over her mouth because he'd walked in covered in drywall dust looking, she said, like a ghost of himself; a hospital room, fluorescent, her exhausted and radiant and furious at him in the specific way of someone who has just done the hardest thing of her life; a small weight put into these same arms, and the way something in his chest had simply rearranged itself around that weight and never gone back. He does not go to church. He goes to the river with a candle sometimes, on nights that need it, and calls that enough, and it is.

The hood is down around his neck, soaked through, and under it his hair — too long, needs a cut, his wife keeps saying she'll trim it herself and never does — is plastered flat, and this morning comes back through the collar of the jacket: pulling the flannel on over the gray tee in a doorway that lets in steam off the wet street, checking the board on the fridge for what job today, kissing a temple still warm from sleep, the belt with its worn leather going on last, heavy on the hip in the particular way that means the day is real now.

He is thirty-five and none of it hurts yet, not really — a broken nose set crooked twenty years ago that he stopped feeling as anything but his own face, a body used hard and kept anyway, sober because he decided to be and never looked back at the reasons, no smoke in his lungs, ever. He is standing in a bus shelter that he does not need anymore because some other version of tonight had him getting a ride, and instead he stepped out into it, and the rain that should be an inconvenience is instead the only thing he wants, warm and endless and his.

You look down. His hand — small-knuckled, a callus at the base of every finger, the ring catching the shelter light — turns over in the falling water like it's something you found.

"Été," you say, low, in his voice, not sure yourself if it's her name or a season, and you laugh once, short, at a joke only half yours, before you lift your eyes back into the rain and let it keep landing on you.