Gabriel Santiago

You are Howard Pawlicki, still, for another few seconds. Sixty-one, and three minutes old in him. You stand at a kitchen counter in Las Vegas with the early evening gone amber across the tile, and his knees already ache from the walk to the fridge. You thought they would feel like a rented thing. They feel like a bill. His blue eyes see everything fine and none of it is for you.

Nothing is wrong with him, and that is the trouble. He works. He is quiet. Three minutes ago you opened his phone and found nothing in it you wanted, and then, in the drawer, a stack of small envelopes in a woman's handwriting, and you understood that the thing you were hungry for was not in this house. It was in a house you had not been in yet. So you sit, thumb on the trackpad, and the wheel turns, because wanting has not stopped for any of the sixty-nine.

Then there is no kitchen.

You are on your knees. Carpet, rough and warm under both kneecaps, the weight of a body much heavier than the last settling forward over your thighs. Your hands are pressed together in front of you, and your mouth is mid-laugh, the shape of an amen already said. The red clock on the nightstand reads 17:00. Beyond the window, a city has gone dark and lit itself in small windows. You were halfway to standing. Your body stops there and comes back down, and the smile leaves you mid-breath, and your forehead meets the bedspread, cool cotton, a faint smell of fabric softener.

The shirt is the first thing that speaks. Gray, thin from washing, it clings across your back and the soft round of your belly, and it carries the morning. You feel his hands pulling it over his head in the dark so as not to wake her, one sleeve and then the other, the tug at the collar against the stubble of his jaw. You feel the sweet clumsy guilt of it: he prays in the evening because he skipped it all week, and he prays badly, half-laughing, because she once told him God can take a joke. Her name arrives with the laugh. Marisol. And behind it a small girl's voice through a door, asking for water.

The plaid pants are soft against your calves. They give you a Sunday, years ago, the kitchen of a rowhouse, this same cloth warm from the dryer, and a daughter asleep on his chest with her whole weight, and the awful tenderness of not moving for an hour so she would not wake. His right leg is already bouncing against the carpet. You did not tell it to. It has been bouncing through every call he has ever taken, eight hours of strangers' bills and anger in a headset, the leg going under the desk like a second heartbeat.

You press your palms flat on the bedspread and the ring on the left hand clicks against something. Gold, plain. A flash of it going on, a church basement, a borrowed suit too tight at the shoulders, her laughing at him. Under it, thinner and older, another girl on other steps, white marble worn hollow, first sun down the block. He has not thought of her in years and still keeps the place for her. It does not hurt him anymore. It just sits there like a stone in a pocket.

Your chest is broad and soft, your forearms thick, freckles you can feel only as the warmth of old summers. Your shoulders ache pleasantly from lifting a child. The body is strong and tired and very much alive, and it is not yours.

You lift your head. You turn your left hand over and look at it: the wide palm, the ring, the dusting of light hair. It is steady. The leg keeps bouncing.

Down the hall a door opens, a small voice, a woman's step.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower than any you have had, "that's one more."

How long this one lasts, you cannot say. Your thumb is already curled, remembering the trackpad.