Efrain Solano

The site loads slow, the way cheap sites do, a wheel drawn in flat colors like a wedding raffle app. You have read about this for years — forums at two in the morning, films where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, the particular ache of wanting to be anyone else for a while — and never once thought it would be a thing you could pay for. It is a dull morning, the kind with nothing in it. You put in a number you can afford to lose and you spin, mostly sure it will spit out an error page.

It does not.

You set the box down.

It is not a decision — your arms simply straighten and the weight leaves them, cardboard scraping onto bare wood floor, and you are standing in a room you have never seen with someone else's held breath still leaving someone else's chest. The keys are in the door behind you, swaying slightly. The light coming through the bare window is white and flat, midmorning here, though somewhere on your end it is also midmorning, a coincidence with no seam in it. You walk the edge of the room anyway, knuckles dragging the wall, because his body wants to before his mind has caught up to whose it is, checking corners like a man confirming a thing is really his.

The t-shirt against your back gives first. Gray cotton, soft from washing, and under it comes a flash of a laundromat on Alameda, quarters, a green plastic basket with a cracked handle — then further back, a closet in a house painted turquoise, hangers scraping, a woman's voice from another room saying *you're going to be late* in a tone that was fond once and tired by the end. Efrain. The name arrives with the shirt, the way his own name would never arrive on its own.

The jeans know things his mind doesn't reach for on purpose: a knee that clicks going down stairs, the phantom pinch of a wedding band that isn't there anymore, ten months gone now, the skin under it still a shade paler than the rest of the finger, like it's waiting to be told the ring isn't coming back. You feel where the tan line sits, feel how his thumb has taken to rubbing it without him noticing, an old man's habit borrowed early.

The backpack strap, when your palm finds it out of a habit not yours, gives you a lawn — green, mowed, a laptop screen too bright for the hour, a cursor blinking on a half-written paragraph about supply curves he did not care about, at thirty-five, surrounded by kids ten years younger who called him sir by accident and then apologized. Community college parking lot, a GI benefit that ran out too fast, a decision made at a kitchen table with a manila folder of custody paperwork already signed. His son's name comes with that — Mateo — a Saturday every other week, a booster seat that lives in the trunk of a car he can't really afford insurance on.

His hands remember other things without your asking: how they used to fumble over words in front of a room, a stutter that only shows itself when someone official is watching, a boss once, a judge once, and how the shame of that sits lower in the chest than it has any right to. How his blood pressure meds are in the box marked BATHROOM in Sharpie, how he keeps forgetting to take them on schedule. How his knuckles know a wrench and a shovel handle better than a highlighter, and how his body has to be told, every single morning, that this — school, backpack, lined paper — is the thing he is doing now instead of the thing he knew how to do.

The dimples are there even though you can't see them, you can feel the muscle memory of them, the face defaulting to something soft no matter what he's carrying or losing. A face people trust on sight. A face that got him through custody hearings and landlord interviews and a divorce that still, on some nights, feels like the front door of this exact new house — something he chose, something that also chose to end.

This morning, before any of this, he had put on this shirt in a bedroom with boxes stacked to the ceiling, one sleeve at a time, and thought, not for the first time, *new place, new year, start over*, thought it the way a man thinks a thing he doesn't fully believe yet but needs to say anyway.

You look down.

The hand in front of your face has a pale stripe of skin ringing one finger, a tan line shaped like an absence. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, and it stutters slightly as you flex it — not from anything you did, just a thing his hands do, unprompted, under a pressure that isn't even there yet.

You lift your eyes to the empty doorway, to the keys still swinging faintly in the lock, to the white morning light lying flat across the floor.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, to no one. "Okay. New place."

You do not know how long you get to say things like that as him. You don't know if the wheel wants you back tonight or in four years. For now the box is down, the keys are in the door, and the room is yours before the lights are even on.