Emilio Vasquez

The apartment is quiet in the specific way Thursday nights are quiet, the kind of quiet that has a screen glowing in the middle of it. You have read about this site for longer than you'd admit to anyone — vessel.cards, a joke of a name for something that shouldn't be real, a wheel rendered in gold on a black background like a slot machine crossed with a tarot deck. You have wanted this since you were young enough to want things without knowing why: to be someone else, actually be them, not read about it, not watch it, not write it at two in the morning in a tab nobody will find. Tonight there is nothing on. You have the card ready. You spin before you can talk yourself out of it, and the wheel does what wheels do, and then it isn't spinning anymore.

The rope is rough in your hand and it is not your hand, and you know that instantly, before you know anything else, because your hand does not have calluses like this and it does not smell like bark dust and diesel and a body that has already sweated through a morning. You are standing with one boot braced against a root the size of a fire hydrant, torso half-turned into a lean, a chainsaw hanging heavy and dead-weighted off a hip you didn't have four seconds ago. Somewhere above you the canopy moves in wind you didn't feel coming. The motion your hands were mid-way through — a wrap, a pull, a check of the figure-eight knot — stutters. You do it wrong. You do it again, slow, and this time it comes out right, and then it comes out right nine more times because something in you that isn't you is watching every single one like it might not be.

And then the shirt.

It's the tank top, sweated through at the collar, and touching it — no, wearing it, being inside it — gives you a hand pulling it on this morning, alone, in a bedroom with a box fan going because the AC unit rattles too loud to sleep through, and the light outside was still gray-blue, four-something, because Emilio works the tree crew that starts before the city's awake, before the heat turns the job into something closer to punishment. You get the whole morning in pieces: the mattress on the floor, no headboard, a phone alarm he silences on the second buzz because his body clock beat it there. The tank top over a chest that already aches faintly in the shoulders — old ache, working-man's ache, not injury, just twenty-two years of pulling weight through rope. Boots that go on in a particular order, left first, always, an old superstition he'd deny having if you asked him. A dip can on the nightstand, and the small ritual of a pinch tucked before he even makes coffee, a habit that isn't about the coffee at all.

The harness comes next, and it comes loaded — buckles that his hands know blind, a webbing pattern worn shiny at the exact points his palms hit it ten times a shift, every shift, for four years since he started climbing for a company that undercuts the bigger outfits and pays him under the table in a way that makes tax season a small yearly panic he doesn't tell his mother about. His mother, who is in Hialeah, who still asks him weekly when he's going to find "a girl who isn't just for a weekend," and he laughs it off because there hasn't been anyone worth more than a weekend in longer than he'd admit, not since a girl named Yesenia decided long distance to Orlando wasn't worth it, and that was almost two years gone now and doesn't hurt the way it used to, just sits there, a room he doesn't go into.

The balcony comes back too — pastel paint peeling at the rail, the ocean haze visible if he leans right, a beer after a big Friday, twice a month, loud with friends from the crew, and otherwise quiet, otherwise just him and the ropes coiled by the door because he never quite stops thinking about work even when he's off it. He likes the height. Has always liked the height, since before this job, since climbing things as a kid got him yelled at and this got him paid. Thirty feet up an oak with the wind moving the whole tree under him is the calmest he gets — stranger than that, it's the only time his leg stops. On the ground, waiting, driving, sitting through inspections, his leg goes like a sewing machine, has since he was a teenager, and up here it just — stops. Stills into the work.

The body under all of it is good. Strong through the forearms in that specific way that isn't gym-built, shoulders that carry rope coils like they weigh nothing, a low ready balance in the legs from a thousand hours standing on things that move. Nothing hurts that shouldn't. Everything is warm from sun that's already climbed high enough to bite.

You look down. The hands gripping the rope are tan-lined at the wrist, nicked at two knuckles, blond hair catching sun on the forearms. You turn one over like it's an artifact.

You lift your eyes toward the pink apartment building glowing beyond the tree, the haze on the water past it, and you say, out loud, in a voice that isn't yours yet but will answer to Emilio for however long this lasts —

"Okay. Okay, keep going."