Ernesto Maldonado

I am standing at the kitchen counter in the dark, in a body that has been mine for less than a minute. The refrigerator hums. Somewhere upstairs a child turns over in a bed that isn't mine. This man is fifty-five, heavy, and his knees complain about the tile. He has a stay-at-home father's forearms, a dish towel over one shoulder, and a sippy cup in his hand with a dried ring of apple juice at the bottom.

He was fine. I should say that. He was a good body, warm and broad, and it worked. But I stood at his sink rinsing a cup and I wanted, plainly and without any reason I would say aloud, to be somewhere I had never been. I wanted a stranger's morning. I set the cup down, the way you put down a thing you will not be needing, and I opened the page.

The wheel turns. Small-town Ohio comes up in its slot. I press.

The mattress is under my whole front. My face is in a pillow that smells of someone else's hair. My breath is ragged, then it is even. My arm hangs off the edge and I draw it up and roll, and my hands fold on my chest. I notice that they have folded themselves. He has never slept like this. The streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the ceiling in one pale bar.

Then the room starts to give him up, through what touches me.

The T-shirt first, gray and soft from washing, collar stretched. Under my back, the sheet, and the sheet is her side of an argument: *you leave them like this every night*, and his own answer, tired, *they're only sheets*. Then the shirt again, and a flash of a man pulling it on in this same dark at five-thirty, because the regional call was at seven. He loved the quiet before a number was due. He loved a chart that told the truth.

My feet find the blanket he kicked onto the carpet. Wool, rough. A boy of six or seven stands in that blanket in a doorway, saying *Dad, I had the dream again*. He kneels, and he knows exactly how to lift the boy with one arm. My arms know it too. There is a ghost of that weight in them.

My palm slides over my own stubble, and I get the barbershop. The clippers, the mirror, the afternoon he decided to shave the whole head instead of watching it thin. He laughed at himself. He touched his freckled nose in the glass and thought, *Mamá's face*. It comes with an ache that is not mine.

The body: forty-three, soft through the middle, thin in the legs, a dull pressure behind the eyes that is last night's second beer. My shoulders are tight from driving, and my tongue is dry. There is a faint taste of old smoke, the cigarette he only allows himself when he is drinking.

Then the glass conference room. The wall of charts behind him. A projector's hum, and a man he is trying hard not to disappoint. Money sits in him like a quiet engine, never mentioned and always there. In the next room a woman breathes, and I know her only as warmth he is used to.

I lift my hands into the streetlight. Broad knuckles, dark hair along the fingers, a pulse in the thumb that is not mine yet. I turn them over once. I look up at the bar of light on the ceiling.

"Okay," I say, in his voice, low and rough with sleep. "You'll do."

Then the question, the one that is always under the first word. How long? Until the wanting comes back, until the wheel turns again. A minute from now. A year.