Esteban Cardenas

The screen is the only light in the room, and it is early, too early, the kind of hour where the dark outside hasn't started thinking about morning yet. You have been awake for this before — different site, different promise, always some stock photo of a brain and a slider that didn't do anything — and you stopped expecting any of them to be real. This one you almost closed, too. A wheel, rendered a little too smooth, a price that felt like a joke at your own expense. You paid it anyway, the way you do things at that hour, half daring it, and it spun, and it did not stop on a cartoon. It stopped on a man.

You feel the desk before you feel anything else. Laminate, cool, a stack of paper gone soft at the corner under your palm, and weight in your other hand — a pen, mid-signature, the nib still touching the page. The office around you has glass walls and the door standing open onto a model-home hush, carpet smell, a lamp throwing yellow onto a street outside that is going blue-dark, streetlamps just starting to commit. A pickup sits in a driveway past the glass, nose-out, like it's been backed in a thousand times. Your hand — his hand — finishes the letter it was on, wrong, a loop where a line should be, and you feel the correction happen almost before you decide it: slow, careful, the next nine letters checked one at a time like a man proofreading his own name.

The pen is what opens first. Rollerball, chewed slightly at the cap though he'd never admit to the habit, and with it comes a flash of a conference room, fluorescent, someone across the table saying *numbers are numbers, Esteban*, and the small flat pride of being the one who always had the numbers. Then the shirt — collar damp at the back of his neck from a day that started at seven and is only now, six, seven hours later, loosening its grip — and through the cotton comes the whole morning: standing in front of the closet in the new-build house that still smells like paint, two polos on hangers, navy and a lighter blue, picking navy because the ID clip shows up better against it. Threading the belt through the loop with the quick, unthinking flick of a man who has dressed himself the same way for twenty years. Chinos that fit because he runs three miles on the treadmill in the garage on Tuesdays and Thursdays and skips it guiltily on Saturdays. Boots laced in the driveway, one foot on the tailgate of that pickup, going over the day's walkthrough list in his head before he'd even locked the front door.

The braids are a weight he forgets until something reminds him — a hand through them in the bathroom mirror an hour before his shift, checking the part, retwisting one that had started to fray at the root, a ritual that's outlasted two apartments and one broken engagement he doesn't let himself think about except in flashes: a ring he returned instead of pawned, a name he doesn't say out loud anymore, not even in his own head. That part of him arrives smaller than the rest, worn down at the edges, filed somewhere he visits less often than the gym.

His body is thirty-nine in the shoulders, in the low ache behind one knee from a slip on a loading dock years back that never quite healed right, in the stubborn strength still sitting in his forearms from a decade of manual work before he made manager. The beard itches faintly where it's been trimmed close to the jaw that morning. The scar through his eyebrow — a bicycle, eleven years old, a curb he misjudged — is just a thin pale seam you can feel if you press it, no story attached to it anymore except the shape. Under the desk, his leg has already started, knee going like a metronome nobody asked for, like it's been doing since junior high, like it does during every budget call and every slow Monday evening when the last walkthrough is done and there's nothing left to check but the paper already in his hand.

You look down at that hand. The pen. The looping E of his own signature, fixed now, legible. You turn it over — his hand, tan, a callus riding the base of each finger, no ring, no mark where one ever sat — and something in you that has waited years for exactly this feeling finally gets to have it.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty glass office, to nobody. "Okay. There you are."

The leg under the desk keeps bouncing. You don't stop it. You don't know yet if you're going to be the one still sitting here tomorrow, and for once, standing in somebody else's body with somebody else's pen still warm in your hand, you let that be true without needing to answer it.