Efrén Maldonado

You are standing in a kitchen in Atlanta, in the dark, in the flour-smelling body of a man named Rubén, and the refrigerator hums at you like it knows. Three minutes. That is how long you have been him. Four hours ago he set a tray of conchas on the rack and burned the inside of his wrist, and you felt it, and you also felt how well he knew where the tray would be without looking. His whole body is a thing that already knows. You are only a guest, with the lights off, eating his bread. His goatee itches. His freckled forearms look like someone else's. Nothing in the house is wrong, and that is the trouble. You wanted to be taken somewhere, and he is a place that has already happened. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb is his thumb, and the spin takes no time at all.

The dock door is open to a black sky and a pink building with lit balconies, and the boxes are exactly where your hands go. A cardboard corner meets your glove. Your weight goes down through your boots into concrete, you are pushing a pallet jack, and your breath comes out slow and wide through a chest that is older than you expected and much stronger. One motion has already gone wrong. The box went in at an angle. You set it again, slowly, and correctly.

Then ten more, each one checked, though this is a job that has not needed checking in years.

The glove first. Stiff leather, sweat-salted at the thumb, and it opens something: a Tuesday, a supervisor half his age explaining a pallet pattern as if to a child, and the heat of keeping his mouth shut, jaw locked, the muscle at the hinge of it going hard as a knuckle. That is where his hands go when they are not busy. It is his jaw that does the clenching. You feel it now, your teeth set together.

The vest, rough and slick with old dirt. Under it the hoodie, and with the hoodie, a morning: a bedroom, the lamp on low, a wife's back turned and breathing. He pulls the zip up over a black T-shirt, one sleeve and then the other, the right shoulder complaining the way it does, and he whispers a short prayer for the day because he always has. The pants stiff at the knee. The boots, laced in the dark on the edge of the mattress, left then right, the old habit of tying them twice. A kitchen light. Three kids' school photographs on the refrigerator, grown now, one of them a stranger's face in a graduation gown, and the pride of it sits in your chest like a warm stone. A cup of coffee he drinks black. A cigarette he does not have anymore, the ghost of it in two fingers. And something steadier than any of it: a table where he once stopped drinking, and the day after, and the day after that.

Under your feet the concrete is cold through the soles. The cleft in his chin pulls when you swallow. The beard is thin where you press it with a knuckle, gaps on the cheeks. A ring is on your left hand, plain, worn smooth, and when your glove brushes it, you know the weight of it before you know her name.

You turn your hand over. It is brown, scarred across the knuckles by years you did not live, the ring dull in the light.

You look up.

"Still here," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. You do not know whose it is yet, or how long it will answer.