Ernie Salcido

You are standing in a kitchen in Seattle, in the dark, in a body that has been yours for less than a minute. The freight handler's shoulders still ache from a shift you never worked. The refrigerator hums. Your gray eyes are fixed on a window with nothing in it. You are twenty-four and tall and well made, and none of it is wrong. It is a good body, and it is already enough of a body that you can feel yourself getting used to it.

That is what sent you back. Nothing is wrong with him. But a man's pantry has a particular brand of cereal in it, and his phone lights up with a name he would have answered. Everything you reach for is already placed by someone who is not you, and you are only borrowing the placing. You stand there at the hour when everyone is asleep and you can hear it, the whole house leaning toward morning without you. You have done this one thousand one hundred and forty times, and this is the first time you have heard the lean.

The page is open. The wheel turns. You pay.

The coin leaves his thumb.

It drops without turning once. The splash goes inward, wrong, folding into itself, and the green water closes over it. You are standing at the lip of a fountain with a cold stone edge against your thighs. The mall is closed and the gates are down. Your breath is a heavy, short thing, and your belly sits against the stone. You are short, and the ground is nearer than you expect.

His jacket is the first thing you touch. The canvas collar scratches your stubbled jaw, and you push your fingers into the pocket. A flash comes up that is his and not yours. It is a hallway in a school, linoleum shining, and a boy of fourteen who will not look up. He had said, *You don't have to answer, just hear it*, and the boy looked up. The feeling is not pride. It is a tired, careful tenderness, like setting down something that might spill.

Your thumb finds the ring on your left hand. It is plain and warm, worn thin on the underside. The rest arrives in a rush. It is his wife in a kitchen with the radio on, laughing at him for saying *library* wrong on purpose. He has said it wrong on purpose for nineteen years. Underneath that is the other woman, the first wife, and a Sunday in a parking lot where he handed over two children's backpacks. It still sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. Not guilt exactly. A debt he pays in small patient ways.

Your shoes are brown, soft with wear, the left one split a little at the toe. Through the soles you feel a sore arch and a heel that has stood at the front of too many rooms. A memory comes up through the floor. It is the empty classroom after the last bell, chalk dust gone gold in the white light, and him alone at the front. He is not grading. He stands for a minute because it is the only minute of the day nobody needs him. He likes the quiet. He would never tell anyone.

The shirt under the jacket is black and soft, and the morning comes with it, sleeve by sleeve. His hands knew the buttons. The thick fingers went down the placket in the dark so he would not wake her. His knees complained on the edge of the bed. He put on the lanyard last, and the keys clicked against his chest. The jeans pinched at the waist, and he promised himself, again, a walk. Coffee, a quick drink in his head for later. A drink or two most evenings. It is never more than that, and he is proud of it.

Money surfaces, quiet and modest, a little put away. Fifty thousand, maybe less, in an account he checks only to feel steady. The wish surfaces too, and it is small. He was not wishing for money. He was wishing that his children would call him on a Sunday without being asked. You feel the wanting sit in your throat, his and not yours, and you almost cannot bear to be the one holding it.

His hands are on the stone. You lift them and turn them over. They are broad and dry, with chalk worn into the creases, and the ring is catching green light. They do not feel borrowed. They feel like they have been waiting for something to do.

You lift your eyes to the dark glass of a shut storefront, where a short heavy man looks back at you with brown eyes and gray stubble.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expect and does not carry far. "Okay, Ernie."

The water goes on moving behind you. You do not know if you will still be him when the gates go up, or by the time the lights come on at dawn. You are only standing here, holding the wish.