Hector Villanueva

You are Rubén Castañeda for another forty seconds, and Rubén's feet hurt. The register drawer in the dark kitchen of his apartment is a thing he keeps in his head even here, in the quiet, hands flat on a counter that is not even his to worry over. Sixty years old, six-one, a soft belly under a shirt that smells of the casino carpet. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the trouble: everything in him is slow. The knees, the sigh he does before he stands. You wanted something that could lift. Tonight you stood at his window over the Las Vegas dark, every house asleep, and understood you had taken a man who could not carry anything heavy, and the wanting came back like a hand on the back of the neck.

So you spin.

Then there is weight. All of it at once, heavy through the chest and belly, and the mattress pushing up under your ribs. Your face is in a pillow. One arm hangs off the bed and the blood has gone out of it, pins and needles. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains, orange, wet-looking. Your breath, which was ragged, goes even in one pull. You drag the arm up, roll over onto your back, and fold your hands on your chest like a man laid out. He has never once slept like this. You can tell, because the body protests it.

Now the things start to speak.

The sheet under your fingers is cotton gone thin, and it hands you a Sunday: a woman's laugh, a kid's foot kicking his kidney in the night, three of them in this bed once with a thunderstorm going. Not your memory. His warm irritation, and under it something that was happiness.

The shirt on your chest is dark and stiff at the collar with dried sweat and dust. It gives you the morning he put it on, the left sleeve first because the right shoulder catches when it's cold, the neck dragged over the ears, the smell of coffee his wife made too strong. He stood at the sink and cracked his knuckles one by one, and you do it now without deciding to. The pop runs up the wrist. The hands are thick, scarred across the pads, knowing a shovel's grain better than they know his wife's face in the dark.

The ring is against your other palm. Plain gold, a little loose in winter. It opens a night on a rooftop years ago, a girl before his wife, an old girlfriend, someone whose name still sits behind his teeth. He never told anyone he still looks her up sometimes, only to see that she is alive. The shame in it is small and tender, and it is his.

Your scalp prickles where the red dye has bled onto the pillow. You feel the dye in memory too: a bathroom, a dare from his oldest boy, his own laughter at the mirror, the M of his hairline pushed back, and not caring. The back aches in the low place from the trench. Under the aching there is strength, deep and stubborn, the kind that moves wet clay all day. A drink or two most evenings, the ghost of a cigarette he quit, the tongue still going to the place where it used to sit.

You are lying very still in a stranger's whole life.

You lift one hand into the orange light. Freckles run down onto the knuckles. You turn it over, palm, then back, the ring catching. Then you look up, past it, at the ceiling, at nobody.

"Okay," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Okay. You're good."

Down the hall a child coughs in sleep. You hold your breath and wait to learn how long this one lasts, or whether the wanting is already stirring.