Elías Navarrete

You have been Tanner Voss for fourteen minutes, and the headset is already too loud in your ears. The call center floor hums around you with forty people saying *I understand your frustration* in forty voices. His throat is raw from it. You came to the site on your break, thumb over the wheel, and you couldn't have told anyone why. He can do everything: sell, smile, hold a script. But nothing in him wants anything. Even the sun on the parking lot, Miami at the middle of the morning, feels like a thing happening to someone else. You want to be hungry for something. You press the wheel.

The fork is halfway to his mouth. The steam is on your lip, and then the cold is on your neck, because the coat is still zipped. The kitchen is dark except for the hood light. The window is a blue square going gray. The morning hasn't started here, and you are standing in the one lit corner of it.

Your left hand is flat on the counter, and the laminate is cold and gritty. Something opens. A hundred crumbs under his palm, and a night of this: the dorm closed for the break, the apartment with its two roommates gone home, and a loan portal open on the laptop until his eyes stung. The coat zipper is under your fingers when you shift your weight. The zipper pull is a bent paperclip, and the memory comes with it. His uncle's old coat, the sleeves taken up an inch by a neighbor woman who wouldn't take money. The morning he put it on, he was already late. The arms went in one, two, the cuffs rough on his wrists. He had been up since four, working the airport cargo shift before class, and the fleece collar still smelled like jet fuel and cold.

The fork is steel and light. The container is rice and egg and something with green chile, and the taste is his: a restaurant two blocks from his mother's house, a birthday, a girl across the table laughing with her whole face. She had told him his gap made him look like he was about to say something clever. He never had anything clever to say. He'd only wanted to be looked at like that again. The ex. The ache of it sits behind his sternum like a swallowed stone.

Your tongue finds the gap between his front teeth. It's a small door, and you press into it. He has done this for years when he's nervous.

His body is small and tired. The knees are fine, the lower back is stiff from cargo crates, the belly soft above his belt. You feel the weight of it, and a strange tenderness comes up. His scalp is smooth under the hood when you lift your free hand. He shaves it every Sunday with a cheap razor, and the memory is the sting and the cold water. The beard is short, trimmed to the jaw with a steady hand.

You look at your hand. Not Tanner's. The knuckles are scraped from the crates, and the nails are bitten short. You turn it over, and the palm is rough and warm. Somewhere south, a man in Miami is staring at a headset on a desk.

You lift your eyes to the black window, to the reflection of a stranger in a coat.

"Okay," you say, and the gap whistles on it. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."