Gilbert Ortega Lucero

You are standing in Colin Dunleavy's kitchen in Philadelphia, and the freckled hand holding the glass of water is the one you are about to put down. He is two days and three hours old to you. The apartment is quiet in the way you wanted, a Friday night with nobody due, and the whole city outside is working its way toward sleep. He has a good job and a good jaw, and a calendar full of Mondays that will go on without him. None of that is the trouble. The trouble is that on the second evening you caught yourself reading a deck for a client and realized you could do it, that you could do all of it, forever, and that it would feel like nothing. Something in you wanted to be handed a thing you didn't know how to do. You rinse the glass. You open the page. The wheel turns, and you are glad of the sound.

Green soap on the skin, cold and slick. A buzz like a hornet in a jar, down in the bone of the forearm. Your jaw is set hard, you've been holding it that way, and your head is turned toward the brick wall and the window with the low gold light in it. Then the power sags. The buzzing winds down to a whine and the lamp overhead browns out, and in those two seconds the clench simply leaves the face. When the light comes back you turn your head and watch the needle go in, the way you would watch someone else's work.

Nothing in the arm flinches now. It is not yours to flinch. The stool is hard under you, the sitting bones are tired, the belly sits soft over the belt. Your fingers are already drumming on the thigh, a small restless rhythm, and you let them.

The cotton of the black shirt is against your back, and it gives you a morning. Gilbert, a bathroom with the fan going. He tugs the shirt over his head because the plaid one is dirty, and he is thinking about the lab, the half-built machine on the bench with its housing off, a bearing that will not seat. He fastens the watch. He thumbs the ring, turns it once, a habit, and a woman's voice calls from down the hall that somebody's shoe is missing. Three kids' worth of noise. He loves it and wants ten minutes of quiet all the same, and the want and the love sit together without a fight.

The denim of the trousers, worn thin at the knee, gives you a Sunday: incense and wax at Mass, a pew, his wife's shoulder against his, a small child sleeping across both their laps. His knees ache on the kneeler. He is not sure he believes in all of it, but he kneels anyway.

The needle bites the back of your hand, and the ink there opens the unit. Heat, sand, a barracks bunk, men he was twenty with. He is getting the hawk touched up again because one of them is dead, and he doesn't tell his wife the reason. That is the thing nobody knows. A cigarette he gave up fifteen years ago still sits in his mouth sometimes, as a ghost of taste.

There is the ring, warm and plain. Then a girl, years back, in a car in the desert, laughing, her name almost there. He keeps her in a drawer in his head and doesn't open it. It's nothing, an old tenderness, but it is his.

You turn your hand over. Gray at the chin, a callus on the thumb, green soap running into the creases of the palm. The hawk is half-finished and bleeding ink.

You lift your eyes to the tattooist, then past him, and you say, low, in a voice that is deep and unfamiliar in the throat: "Keep going. I've got it."

The needle goes on. You flex the fingers and wonder how long you get to keep them.