Gregory Hollis

You are leaving Efrén Maldonado with his shoulders aching in the dark kitchen in Miami, the way they have ached for eight minutes and for sixty-five years. The freight yard is in the muscles of his back. His knuckles are thick and cracked, and the refrigerator hums over a house where everyone sleeps. He has a cleft chin you keep finding with your thumb. He is a good body and it does what you ask. But you stood at his sink with a glass of water and could not stop listening for the pallet jack, a sound that belongs to a man who is not you. What you wanted was to be light, and he has never once been light. So you sit down at the phone with the wheel on it, and you pay.

The wheel turns, and the kitchen is gone.

Cold wet air. A kerb drops away under your shoe and your whole weight goes forward, and your hand slaps down on the wet roof of a parked car. The metal is freezing. Beer sits sour and warm in your stomach. The street is empty, the shops are shuttered, and one shoe has been scuffing, but now it stops. You push off the car and walk.

Your jacket hangs open, and the canvas cuff is stiff and rough against your wrist. Something comes up through it unasked. A hook by a door, a hand reaching for it in the dark, and a feeling of being tired in a way that is nearly tenderness. The morning is his. The plaid shirt, no, the hoodie, pulled over a head with thin hair. The zipper stuck, and a woman's voice from the stairs saying he'd be late. Two small shapes asleep upstairs, and the stillness of a house he loves.

Your tongue finds the gap between your front teeth and the memory lands whole. A lab bench at dusk, the oscilloscope glowing green, a circuit board clamped flat. He is humming. A trace on the screen finally settles, and the pleasure of it is clean and private, the best part of his week. Nobody at home would understand it, so he never says it.

The wedding band is cool on your left hand. When you turn it with your thumb there is a kitchen, a younger woman laughing, and a promise made badly and meant entirely. In your pocket your fingers find a vape and a key. The vape is warm from his leg, and a craving rises that is not yours. The key brings a front door and a lamp left on for him.

Your legs are thin and quick. The cartilage in your ear aches with cold. Your knees are fine, your breath is easy, and the beer is already thinning out. Your hands know how to hold a small probe steady without being told.

Forty steps, even and quiet. At the corner your feet turn left. That is not his way home, and he would know it. You stop under the dripping awning, lift both hands into the light, and turn them over. The ring catches.

"Well," you say, in his voice, a little hoarse. "Look at you."

Light, finally. You wonder how long it lasts, and whether you will still be him when the sun comes up.