Esteban Ruiz Salinas

You are nineteen and you have been him for one minute, and already you are tired of how easy he is.

Carson Blake Lindauer. Sailor, Phoenix, a Wednesday night with the window open and the heat still coming off the parking lot. His arms are long and his knees do not hurt, and the beauty mark above his lip keeps catching your tongue when you worry at it. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. You stood in his dress whites a minute ago and a stranger's mother looked straight through you, proud, and you felt nothing. A body that works and wants nothing is a coat on a hook. So you open the page, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb before you have admitted that you are going to do it.

The wheel clicks and the sailor goes out of you like a held breath.

Cold water is running over your wrist. Mint, foam, the plastic handle in your right fist, and the brush stopped hard against a tooth. The ceiling is low and textured. The light over the mirror hums. You are standing barefoot on linoleum that has gone soft with age, and the whole world is a few inches shorter than a second ago. You were halfway across a stroke. You finish it. Then you do the other side, slower, back into the molars, because something in you wants to feel the thing you now own.

Your free hand goes to the top of your head and runs back over the fade, tight at the sides and thick on top. It rasps. It did that before you decided to.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. It is soft, grey, enormous on a frame this thin, and the cotton has been washed to nothing. The collar lies on the collarbone and a morning comes up through it. He pulled it from the dryer at four in the afternoon, still warm, because he sleeps in daylight, and he shook it out and put one arm in, then the other. A woman was in the next room humming. The hum comes up with the memory, and the feeling with it: a plain, unremarkable love, a man who stopped counting how lucky he was somewhere around year three and has never stopped being it.

The sweatpants are heavy and bagged at the ankle. Under your thumb, a stiff patch on the thigh. Hydraulic fluid, a hose that let go on the track of the dozer, the cold line of it across his leg and a foreman's laugh in the dark. He was sitting on the steel with the engine ticking, and the water tower across the flat blinked red, and he thought: I am good at this. It is the only thing he is sure of in the whole world.

You lean on the counter, and the laminate edge presses into the heel of your hand. The ring clicks against it. The band is thin and warm and loose. Memory takes the ring. A porch, a gravel road, a hand on his collar. Then a second woman, earlier, a girl in a truck cab, crying, saying his name, and he said nothing. That one stays in him like a stone in a boot. He has not told his wife how long he sat in the driveway after.

You spit. You rinse once and the water is grey with paste. You rinse again. The brush goes into the cup bristles-up, the way he never does, and some old reflex in him objects, a small hurt hum in the muscle.

The pain is honest. The lower back is tight from ten hours of vibration. The shoulders are narrow and strung. The stomach is empty and he has a little money put away, and a wife asleep down the hall, and none of it is yours.

You look at the hand. Turn it over. Freckled across the knuckles, a thin line of dirt in every crease, the ring. Then up, into the mirror: green eyes, a goatee, a spray of freckles you did not choose.

"Hello, Esteban," you say, and the voice is low and rough and Texan.

Somewhere past the window a dog is barking at the dark. You wonder whether you get to keep him until morning.