Esteban Rojas

You are standing in a stranger's kitchen in Small-town Ohio, and the stranger is you, and you have been him for thirty-four minutes. The coffee maker ticks. His chinstrap itches. His blue eyes have been staring at the same box of cereal for a while now.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He picked orders all day and slept like a stone, and when you tried to want his life, nothing came up. He has a mother who calls on Thursdays. You let it ring this morning and felt nothing about that either. The wanting went out of him the way heat leaves a cup. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb, his thumb, is already moving.

Then the floor goes out from under the Ohio kitchen, and you are on your knees.

Carpet, thick and cheap, pressed into both kneecaps. Your own breath is in your mouth, halfway through a laugh. You were standing, almost, and now you are not. Your forehead meets a bedspread, and the cotton smells of dryer sheets and sleep. Blinds glow blue at the window. The clock on the nightstand says 11:30, and the light behind the slats is not the light of a man's evening. He works nights. This is his morning, a Thursday that has not started yet.

The weight comes first. It is heavy and low, settled in the belly and the thighs, and your knees complain at once. They are twenty-five years old and have been complaining for a long time. Your hands are shut together under your chin. Your lip still holds the end of a smile.

The t-shirt touches you first, soft and washed thin, and it gives you a morning. He pulled it from the drawer at the end of a shift, too tired to hang anything. His thumb found the hole in the collar and he thought, one more wash. Then the sweatpants, and the drawstring he never ties. Then the carpet under his knees, and his mother's voice in a church kitchen, a folding chair, a paper plate. *You don't have to mean it, mijo. You just have to kneel.* He has knelt every night since, not very seriously, and the habit is almost a joke between him and God. He says amen early. He always does. It makes him laugh.

The nightstand is under your forehead's edge. You reach and your fingers close around the water bottle, plastic crackling. Now the work comes. It is a bakery kitchen at four, before anyone, and dough rising under a cloth. The ache of lifting trays of conchas to the rack is in the shoulders. The heat of the ovens has sunk into his forearms for good. There is a sweetness in him that has no name, a quiet pride when the bread comes out right and nobody is there to see. He keeps a little money put away, and he thinks about it the way other men think about a girl. Lately he has pictured a door with his own name painted on the glass.

He is alone. The silence of the apartment is his, and he likes it more than he admits. Your knees burn. Your hair falls in your eyes, silver and shapeless, and the goatee scratches the bedspread.

You push up slowly onto one hand. The room tilts and settles. You open your hands and look at them: wide palms, the calluses pale at the base of each finger, a nick of old flour in the creases. They are not yours. They are very warm.

You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes to the dark glass of the window, to the face there with the mole high on one cheek, and you say, quietly, "Amen."

The clock changes to 11:31. You do not know how long this one will last. You are already listening for the wanting.