Gabriel Ortega Villanueva

You are standing in a kitchen in Eastern Kentucky, in the middle of a Monday morning, in a body that is heavy and tired and fine. Nathan Cho Whitaker. Eight days and two hours. The keys on the hook are his, and the keys on the hook still belong to the facility, and you have not once thought of either as yours. This morning his supervisor called about a double. You said yes in his voice and then stood here with the phone warm in his hand, and understood that the hands were not the problem. The problem was that nobody in this house knew the man at the sink, and the one person who rang to ask how he was said it like a question about weather. You had the chin with the cleft in it. You had the bad knee. You had a life that worked, and you could not make yourself want it at all.

The wanting always comes back. You open the page.

The wheel turns, and you pay.

You arrive sitting down. The mattress edge is hard under your thighs, the carpet is rough through socks, and your right hand is flat on your chest, feeling for a button that is not where it should be. Ribs under the cotton. A tie hangs loose on either side of your neck. Light from the window lies across the unmade bed, and the room smells like laundry and old coffee.

The shirt gives you the first of him: your fingers close on the placket, and it is dawn, and he is standing in the dark so he will not wake the man asleep in the bed, buttoning from the bottom because the top ones are stiff. He misses one. He knows it, and he lets it go, because the sleeping man's arm has come out from the blanket and is lying open on the sheet, and that is the thing he is looking at. Not tenderness exactly. Arithmetic. How many more mornings of this.

The ring is cool on your left hand. You turn it with your thumb and it brings a kitchen, the husband laughing with his head back about a thing he cannot finish telling, a pan on the stove, an argument about whose turn it was and the quiet that was sweeter than the laughing. Then something older under it: an ex, a car parked outside a house in Squirrel Hill, a name he does not say anymore. It surfaces, and he sets it down gently, the way he sets down everything.

The tie is silk, worn at the knot, and it brings the store: the long blue aisle, the box faces turned out to the front, the pricing gun heavy in his palm. Eleven years of other people's televisions. He is good at it. He is better at it than anyone there has ever said. His jaw is tight right now, you realize, the muscle jumping under the smooth skin. It does that when he is not thinking. Your tongue finds the hinge of it and it aches.

The socks, the parquet edge under your heel, the shoes waiting on the carpet. A Sunday, a pew, his husband's shoulder against his, the old words he still says. The body is thirty-six and strong, but it carries a long tiredness in the lower back, and a fine hum of last night's drink or two behind the eyes.

None of it is yours. All of it is yours to stand inside.

You look at your hands. The left one, the ring. You turn it over, palm up, and the palm is clean and unfamiliar and warm. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is not Nathan's, "hello."

You do not know how long this one lasts. Already, faintly, at the edge of him, something is listening for the wheel.