Faisal Haddad

You are leaving Marcos Guerrero on a Monday before the light, and the leaving has a reason you will not say aloud. Twenty-five days in him, and last night his sister called from Bogotá in a language that sat in his mouth like a stone in a shoe. You answered in the wrong tongue. You stood in his kitchen holding his phone, a stranger to his own mother's name for him. The beard itched. The blue eyes watched you in the black window of the microwave. He had a body that worked, and it was not enough. You wanted someone whose life you could not be caught failing at. The page is open and the wheel is already turning.

Then the arrival. Dark, a streetlight through a gap in the curtain. Your breath goes from ragged to even in a single pull, and the arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at your chest. You have never slept like that. He never did either. You are lying in unmade sheets in a room that smells of cedar and a cigar put out hours ago.

Now the sheets give him up. They are cool and rough, washed too many times, and your fingers close on them and a woman's laugh comes, close to the ear: his wife, telling him he sleeps like a man falling off a roof. Your thumb finds the ring on the left hand and turns it. A wedding in a rented hall. A fear in his chest that he would drop the glass, because his hands were shaking, and her father watching. The ring is warm from your own skin.

The shirt is soft cotton, gone thin at the collar. You remember the morning he put on the work version of it, sleeve by sleeve, in the dark: left arm first, because the tattoo on the right is stiff in the cold, black ink he got at nineteen and has half hidden ever since, as a man hides something he has made peace with and not forgiven. Then the vest, the pencil, the folding rule, the white hard hat on its hook.

Something presses your hip. A lighter, left in the pocket of the sleep pants. Your fingers flip it before you ask them to, over and over, a habit older than the marriage. A flash: a roof, a steel frame going up, a cigar after the pour, ash on his boots. Then the daughter at seven, asleep on his chest in a truck cab. And someone else, an old girlfriend, a street in a city he left, a letter never answered. You feel the guilt of it as a small, clean ache that is not yours and sits in your ribs anyway.

The body underneath is honest. Fifty-eight years in the knees, a dull bar across the lower back, shoulders strong from decades of lifting. Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved. One eye drifts outward when you are tired, and you feel it drift now, the room splitting slightly at the edges. There is no alcohol in this blood, ever; it is strangely clear.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are broad, scarred across the knuckles, a pale band where the ring sits. You look up.

"Faisal," you say, trying the name in a dry throat. The house is silent around you. How long will you keep this one, and when will the wanting come back?