Esteban Cordero Vallejo

You are standing in a kitchen in Ohio with paint under your nails that are not yours, and the thing that sent you back is a ladder. Neil Garrett Pruitt, 28, skinny fat, afraid of heights. Forty minutes ago a man on the second floor of a clapboard house handed you a bucket, and you stood at the foot of the ladder with your knees shaking, a body that would not go up. You had paid for it. You could not climb it. The stubble itches. The freckled forearm shakes on the counter. You put the phone down on the wet rag and open the page with the wheel.

The wheel turns. A hundred.

Cold. Salt in the nose, wet sand in the air, a chain in both hands, heavy and slick with sea. The rhythm of the work has you: pull, seat, pull. One link goes wrong. Your hand misses the hook by an inch, and you make it again, slowly, correctly. Ten more links, each one checked, as if the chain might lie.

Here is the body. Five foot six and dense, weight low in the thighs, the shoulders wide and sore from the pull. The head is bare and cold under the cover. The jaw is smooth, shaved this morning close enough to sting. The tongue finds the bridge of the nose without being asked, and the nose is crooked, set a little to the left. Where the shirt rubs the chest there is a small hard ring of metal, and each breath moves it.

The chain gives you the first thing. Ten thousand links, and his hands remember the weight of it from the first week, a sergeant with a voice like gravel saying, "Don't look at it, feel it." Then the sleeves. The shirt is stiff with salt, and the memory comes up through the cuffs: four-thirty, a dark room on a porch-side floor in Boston, a girl asleep with her back to him, his boots by the door. He rolls each sleeve in two precise folds, left, then right, because that is how it is done, and the second fold is how he calms down. He does not wake her. He stands a moment in the doorway of the bedroom, and what he feels is not love exactly but a dull, steady ache, because there is another woman's name still on his phone, the recent one, and he has not deleted it. He is not proud of that.

The boots take you next. The leather has gone soft at the ankle, the laces knotted twice. Under them the ramp is wet steel, and the cold comes through the sole into the arch. A beer in a bar with men whose names you do not know, once or twice a month, and somebody laughing, and him laughing, loud, the one night he lets himself. The tattoos pull in the cold, the old ink gone soft at the edges, a rose, a swallow, a dagger. He got the first one drunk and has never wanted it gone.

The memories stop, the way a tide stops, and the beach is just a beach, gray and quiet at dawn, the big green vehicle with its ramp down and the house on the dune with its porch lit. Nobody is looking at you.

You lift your hands. They are broad, scarred at the knuckle, brown, steady. You turn them over. They are not shaking. They are not afraid of any ladder.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see what you can do."

Somewhere under the question is the other one, the one you cannot answer: how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be standing here when the chain is racked.