Efraín Zamudio

You are Neil Guidry for less than a minute, standing in his kitchen in New Orleans with the refrigerator humming and a glass of water going warm in his hand. Everyone in the house is asleep. His knees ache on the tile. His beard itches. He is a fine body, a working body, and you have already learned that he can type ninety words a minute, that he hates the way the building smells of toner, that his sister calls on Sundays. None of it is the trouble. The trouble is that you stood in the dark and found you wanted to be someone whose back could carry something. You set the glass down. You open the page. The wheel turns, clicks, slows, and you do not decide anything; your thumb does.

Then the mattress is under your chest, and the sheet is damp against your cheek. Your breath is ragged, borrowed, caught halfway up a throat that was snoring a second ago. An arm hangs off the bed, and the blood has gone out of it. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lays one orange line across the carpet.

You breathe once and it evens out. Your arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back, and the body is heavy, wide through the middle, short in the legs, and it settles into the bed like something that has been hauling all day. Your hands fold on your chest. Somebody has never slept like this.

The shirt comes first, stiff with dried dust at the hem. Under your fingers a morning opens: his hands pulling it over his head in the dark, the wife's shape still asleep, the coffee he drank standing at the counter because the truck was already warming. Steel going up behind a gravel lot. A crew of eight waiting for him to say which beam first. He is good at it. He is the one they look at when the crane swings wrong, and he knows, in his shoulders, how to stand so they stop being afraid.

The sweatpants, soft at the knee. A different memory: a girl, small, on his shoulders at a cable footbridge over a brown creek, her sneakers kicking his chest, green shade pouring through the trees, her shriek when the bridge swayed. His daughter. His laugh, which is yours now and comes out of you as a breath. Then something older and sourer: a woman in another kitchen, an ex-wife, saying his name like a closed door. He has never fully stopped answering it.

The ring. You turn it with your thumb and a whole night arrives: a small church hall, a wife laughing with her head back, his terror, his certainty. Under it, a thing nobody knows: he sends money every month to a man he once cheated out of a job, and has never said why.

Your calves are tight. Your lower back has a bright, patient ache. Your jaw is rough with stubble. His heart is slower than Neil's, steadier, a big engine at idle.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. The wedding band catches orange. The knuckles are scarred, thick, and not yours, not at all, and they close when you ask them to. You look up, past them, into the dark.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that sits low in this chest. "Okay. You'll do."

Somewhere under the quiet is the question you never say: how long. Tomorrow, or four minutes. The wanting is asleep. It always wakes.