Efraín Maldonado

You are Julio Carrasco for less than a minute, and already it is wrong. The mop bucket's gray water is still turning in the sink, the key ring on your hip is still heavy, and you know where the bathrooms are on every floor without being told. It is a good body. Nothing in it is broken. But the man who owned it had a way of standing in the stairwell, a stoop he wore the way other men wear a coat, and you can feel him leaning out of your spine like a draft. A beauty mark you keep catching in the dark of the steel door. You wanted a thing that held you, and you got a mop handle. So you open the page with his thumb, the wheel waiting there in the middle of the morning, and you pay.

It turns. It clicks. Then there is no stairwell.

There is a red glare behind your eyelids, and heat on one cheek where the foil has peeled at the corner and laid a bar of daylight across your face. You turn from it. Your neck complains. You turn back into it and open his eyes and hold them open, and the white of it does not make you blink.

The ceiling is stained brown in a long continent. You are lying on top of the blanket, on your back, one leg off the edge of the mattress, and the leg is bouncing. It was bouncing before you got here. You did not tell it to.

Everything is his before it is yours. The cloth of the hooded jacket is stiff at the cuffs, and when your wrist turns against it you are standing in a loading door with the cold coming off a trailer, and a box of canned tomatoes is going up onto the stack, the corner of it biting the pad of the palm. Forty a night, sixty, you don't count. The jacket zip is open halfway. He did it halfway at six this morning because his hands were too tired to finish, and he thought, *Ma would say something*, and the thought had no sting in it, only a warm tired shape. Mother, then, somewhere, a phone he lets ring on Sundays and picks up on Mondays.

The work trousers are heavy with dust, rough at the thigh, and when your hand drags down them you get the knees going soft on a long drive home through a town with one stoplight and a diner shut since March. He drove past it anyway. He always looks in. The booth by the window where somebody once put a hand on the back of his neck, in another summer, and he let it stay. Nobody knows that. Not the crew, not the priest at the early Mass he still half-goes to, kneeling with his bad knee out to the side. He prays in short pieces, like orders. *Let me be tired in a good way.* He is lonely in a way he has never said aloud, and it is soft as a bruise in the middle of him, and you press it by accident and it fills your chest.

The socks are damp at the heel. The mattress is thin under your shoulder blades, a spring pushing at the bone. A phone glows face-down on the nightstand next to a green bottle, and a half inch of something in the bottle: two drinks, most nights, one for the shift and one for the quiet. The room smells of dust and rubber soles and old coffee, and under it, faint, the soap he uses, and that smell opens an afternoon so plain it hurts. He is nine, and his father is lifting him onto a truck bed to see the field burning off across the road.

His back is sore low down where it always is. His arms are strong and slow, the shoulders warm and used up. The hunger is real. The dimples are there too, you can feel them now, pressed into your cheeks by a smile you did not mean to make.

You lift your hand into the bar of light. Calluses ridged along the base of the fingers, dirt in the creases that no soap reaches. You turn it over. Palm, back, palm.

Then you look up, past it, at the foil, the glare, the whole bright morning of a stranger.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower than you thought it would be, warm, a little rough. "Okay. Hello."

The leg is still bouncing. Somewhere in you the wanting is asleep, but it always wakes, and you do not know whether that is in an hour, or a year, or before this light moves off your face.