Ignacio Barrera

You are Connor Yeager for thirteen minutes more, and you are already tired of his beard. It is the middle of a Tuesday morning in Philadelphia. You stand at his kitchen counter with his phone in your hand, his coffee going cold, and the quarterly sheet open on the laptop. The sheet is not the reason. You look at it anyway, at the column he would have fixed, and your thumb knows where to go. The thing you will not say out loud is that something in his chest went quiet when you read the last line of his mother's text, and you did not like how easily that happened. You did not want to be kind. You want a body where nobody texts. You press the button.

Light, then a floor that is not there.

Then weight. You are lying face-down, and one arm hangs into cold air. Your breath is ragged, and then it isn't: it evens out in a single pull. The arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest. The posture is not yours and it was never his either. The ceiling is stone, and a line of gray light cuts the curtain.

The sheet under your fingers is rough, washed a thousand times. It gives you something: a cold floor, knees, a hundred mornings of getting up before the bell because lying still frightened him. He slept face-down so that no one could see him pray badly. The brown nightshirt is soft at the cuffs. A flash: him in a kitchen in some hot country, his mother's hand over his, teaching him to hold a pen. Click, click. His thumb is doing it now against nothing, a pen that isn't there.

You sit up. The stone floor is cold through the soles of your feet, and the cold climbs. Your back aches in the low place, fifty-two years of bending to rows of chard. You press the small of it and a whole afternoon opens: the garden wall, warm under his palm, a cigarette he does not smoke anymore, the taste of it still in his memory like a coin. He quit in March. He quit drinking before that, in a bad winter he never told anyone about. You reach for the black habit hanging on the peg, and the wool brings him dressing: the scapular over the head, the belt pulled to the same worn hole, the rosary clicked onto the leather. He did it half-asleep every morning for twenty years, and never once felt rich or poor.

You smooth your moustache. You feel the high bare forehead, the long hair behind. Nothing on him is yours.

You look at his hands. Calloused, brown, open. You turn them over.

Then you lift your eyes to the dim window and say, quietly, "Good morning, Ignacio." You do not know how long he lasts.