Hector Salinas

Hector Salinas. That's the name that comes up when I think to look, and it comes up like a coin from a drain.

Before it, the body I'm leaving: Ismael Barragán, forty-nine, in a Pittsburgh kitchen at midday, a machine operator's lunch going cold. His knees are bad. He gets up from the table with a hand on it. I have worn him for under a minute and already I can tell what he is: a man who has made peace. His life is a place a person could rest. Something in me cannot stand that. The last one, the one before him, had a dog that watched me. This one has a calendar on the fridge with his daughter's recital circled. I am not here to be a father. I put the phone on the table, the wheel on it, and pay.

The room goes. The bench is under me, hard, and a floor of poured concrete, and I am bent forward with my forearms on my knees and a bottle sweating by my boot. The air is cool and smells of cardboard and floor cleaner. There is a window high up, white with morning. My chest is working like a man who has just stopped.

The shirt first. Blue chambray, soft from washing, cuffs rolled twice. Against my back it gives me a morning: a hand pulling it off a hook in a dark closet, careful, because the husband is still asleep in the bed, one arm thrown over the pillow where Hector was. The buttons are done wrong by one and fixed in the dark by feel. He kissed the sleeping shoulder. He does it every day and the husband never remembers. Tenderness, mine now, not mine.

The pants, gray, worn at the knee. The belt notch is the third one, and the third one is a lie he tells himself, the fourth is where it really sits. The belly rests on my thighs, soft, and the legs under it are strong from years of carrying cases. My lower back has a low hum of ache that is simply the price of the job.

My hands are clasped between my knees. The left wears a plain band. I turn it with my thumb and it comes, a church basement, folding chairs, his mother crying the wrong way, a priest who was kind about it. Then Marco, years before: a car, a lake, a fight that never finished. The ex is a splinter he's never taken out. It surfaces and goes under.

The nails are chewed to the quick. My teeth want them. My mouth is already pulling the thumb up, and I feel the gap between my front teeth with my tongue, a small doorway he has been self-conscious about since he was nine, when a cousin whistled through it and everyone laughed. He learned to smile with his lips closed, then stopped bothering.

Sleeves rolled, the ink is mine to look at: a swallow, a dagger, bold black gone soft at the edges. He got the dagger at twenty-two, drunk and happy, and his mother did not speak to him for a week.

Then I understand there is a bar above me, cold and knurled, and that I was about to do something with it. Nothing to do with it. The vape is in a pocket. A rosary is in the other.

I lift my hand and look at it. Turn it over. The band, the bitten nails, the dagger's tip on the wrist. I raise my eyes into the room, and I say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

How long, I wonder. Until the wanting comes back. It is already stirring, small, under his ribs.