Ernesto Galarza

The cold room smells like bleach and old blood, and the cauliflower ear is throbbing again where it always throbs when a storm's coming in, though there's no storm, there's no window even, just the walk-in door propped with a broom and Ruben Salcido leaning on the frame on a fifteen-minute break, thumb dead on his own phone. Twenty-three hours and twenty-four minutes in this one. Good hands, this man. Quick with a knife, quiet with customers, a wife who calls at lunch and he lets it go to voicemail every time out of some habit that isn't yours. None of it is boring exactly. It's just that the ear aches and the walk-in smells the same every day and there's a phone in your hand that isn't yours either, and the site is one tab over, the wheel already spun up bright behind the blood-flecked glass. You don't decide so much as notice your thumb has already gone to it. Eighty-four times now. You pay again before you can call it anything.

The scroll speeds up under a thumb that was six inches from sleep a second before. Weight comes down around you all at once — heavy through the middle, a gut resting against the thigh like a sandbag, a body laid on its side on top of a comforter that smells like fabric softener and one dog that isn't in the room. Blue light on the cheek. A ring pressing cool against the finger holding the phone. Outside whatever window is behind you, it's still bright — full daylight leaking gold at the edges of blackout curtains that don't quite reach the sill, and that wrongness sits there a second, because it should be night for a man in bed, and it isn't, not here. The thumb, faster now, flicks past a photo of mountains, past a score, past a face he didn't finish looking at.

The shirt is the first thing — not on him now, days-old memory of it snagging at the shoulders, too tight over the belly the way all of them are lately, CHERAMIE-MOYER stitched crooked over the pocket because the embroidery machine downtown always runs the letters uphill. Putting it on that morning: left arm first, always left, some old superstition from his own father who drove trucks and said left boot first too, for luck, though Ernesto couldn't tell you why he still does it. Sunglasses parked on his head before he even needs them, out of habit, out of Denver light that comes in low and mean off the peaks at certain hours. Twenty years on the same route, more or less — 15 now, downtown to the far end of Federal, the same stops, the same three regulars who wave with their whole arm like he might not see them otherwise. He likes the ones who say good morning. He likes even the ones who don't.

The bed under him now, though — not a work morning, a day off, the kind where Marisol's at her sister's and the apartment (bungalow, hers before his, porch facing the mountains he still isn't used to after eleven years married) goes quiet enough that the phone becomes the whole afternoon. He was watching something stupid. A car crash compilation, maybe, or a man building a shed in fourteen minutes. The wedding band is warm from his own hand, worn eleven years smooth, and it comes with the memory of her slipping it on him outside a church in Pueblo, his mother crying not from happiness exactly, more from some private arithmetic of her own, and him not able to stop grinning because he'd practiced not grinning in the mirror all morning like an idiot.

His body under yours: forty and heavier than he means to be and okay with it most days, the gut a fact rather than a wound, hands soft compared to Ruben's, softer than a man who drives all day has any right to have, because he doesn't lift anything heavier than a farebox. Left knee that clicks going up the two steps into the bus. A ring on the hand. Hair too long, curling at the neck, because he keeps saying he'll get it cut and keeps not going. The scalp itch under it, and the hand comes up without him — without you, even, it just happens, muscle older than thought — and rubs once over the crown of his head, the gesture already halfway done before you notice you're the one doing it.

You look at your hand after, both of them, turning the left one over so the band catches the last of the blue phone-light. Not his gesture this time. Yours, borrowed, deliberate, checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty bungalow, to the mountains he can't see from in here. "Okay."

The phone is still unlocked in your palm, his last search still sitting there, waiting on a thumb that isn't his anymore and hasn't decided yet how long it's staying.