Hector Salinas

You are leaving Stephen Dombrowski, and he has been yours for less than a minute. The apartment is dark and the radiator ticks. You stand in the middle of his kitchen at the hour when nobody in Chicago needs anything from anyone. His belly pushes at the waistband of borrowed sweatpants. His scalp is cool where it was shaved. The laptop glows on the counter with the wheel on it. Nothing is wrong with him. He can stand and breathe and pay for things, and that is exactly what is wrong. You wanted a body to want something, and he has none of it. His wanting is a small gray room with the door open. You click.

Wet pavement is under you, and you are mid-stride. One shoe scuffs the ground. Cold salt air goes down a throat that tastes of beer and the lime someone put in it. You stumble off the kerb. Your palm lands flat on the cold wet roof of a parked car, and the street swings, then settles. The scuffing stops. Your feet fall even and quiet, because you are not drunk the way he is drunk. You are only in a drunk man's body, and the body is doing the work.

The jacket comes first. Canvas, stiff at the cuffs, the corduroy collar rough against your neck. Your fingers close on the zipper pull and he comes up through it. He bought it secondhand the winter the heat failed. He wore it in the office and everyone made the same joke about it. Under it is the plaid flannel, soft with washing. Tonight he buttoned it crooked, in the dark bathroom, with the toothpick already between his teeth.

There is one in your mouth now. Your tongue finds it, and the splintered end has been chewed to pulp. It is what his hands and jaw do when nobody asks, and the habit has been there since he was nineteen. You taste pine.

Your hand goes into the jacket pocket and finds keys. A bottle opener is on the ring, and a brass house key worn smooth. Then comes the flash. A woman's voice says *you never say what you want, Hector,* and he is standing in a kitchen holding a dish towel. The ache of it comes up under your ribs, wide and stupid and warm. Her name is Marisol. She left a month ago. He still sets out two mugs. He was at the bar tonight because the second mug was too much.

The nose throbs in the cold. A boy's elbow broke it at a school soccer game in Lawrence, and his mother held ice to it in the car. It never set quite straight. Now you feel the crooked bridge when you breathe in, and the air whistles faintly on one side.

You are heavy and sure-footed, built low. The knees ache dully. The calves are strong from stairs. His hands are rough at the fingertips from paper and cardboard and years of the copier door. Somewhere behind your eyes is the front office at the shipping company, the copier warming up, the smell of toner and burnt dust. Mr. Pelkey says *Hector, you're a lifesaver* and has never once learned to refill the paper. Forty years old, and his savings are small and honest.

At the corner the road offers two ways. Home is right, toward the shingle house gone silver and the lobster traps stacked in the dooryard. His body begins to lean that way, the old habit of it. You turn left. Nothing here belongs to you except the turning.

You lift your hands into the lamplight. They are broad and brown, with short square nails and dark hair at the knuckles. You turn them over. They are warm. They are yours until they aren't.

You look up and say, low, in his rough, easy voice, "Okay. Let's see you."

Down the street the fog moves. You do not know whether this one lasts the night, or whether the wanting is already stirring.