Ismael Barragán

You are Gary Nishimura, and your knees are sore in the way of a man who has been a firefighter a long time. It is mid-morning in Seattle. The engine bay smells of diesel and floor wax, and you are standing in it with a cup of coffee going cold in a hand that could crack a walnut. Less than a minute ago this body was new. It already feels like a coat you've worn for a decade. Six feet of muscle, a shaved head, and you can't stop running your palm over the smooth scalp as if it might finally feel like yours. It never will. Nothing here is a problem, and that is the problem. The body works, and the wanting has come back anyway, the way hunger does. You set the coffee down. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then the wind stops.

It stops all at once, as though a hand has closed over the world. You are on a porch. The screen door is banging behind you, and then it isn't, because your left hand has caught it. The air is dead and green, and the cloud wall crossing the field is the color of a bruise gone black. Your feet are already moving. You are not going inside. You step off the boards toward the grass with your chin up and your hands loose, and he is built for this. You are shorter now, compact, low in the center, and the ground is closer and more honest.

The first thing that comes is the hoodie. The cotton is soft and worn thin at the cuffs. The morning he pulled it over his head comes back, one sleeve and then the other, in his hands. It was dark in the kitchen and he was not awake yet. He worked a stick of gum out of its foil with his thumb before he even found the light, and your jaw is already working. There is gum in your mouth, mint gone sweet and rubbery, and you chew without being told to. The motion is older than you are.

The jeans come next, stiff at the knee, soft at the thigh. They hold a hundred shifts. Standing at a line where plastic comes out of the die warm and endless, pale as a rope of candy, and he watches the gauges and his hands know the valves. His hands hold a quiet that is almost tenderness. Something in his pocket knocks against his hip, a lighter, and with it comes the pack-a-day ache in the top of the lungs, a rasp low in the breath. You draw the air in anyway. It tastes of ozone and cut hay.

The boards under the soles of his shoes give a little, and under that comes the stairs. The public stairs between the backyards, concrete slick with wet leaves in late light. He is climbing them with someone ahead of him, a woman laughing over her shoulder, her hand trailing the rail. He is thirty-something and wants to say a thing, and doesn't. That is the whole memory, a sentence he swallowed. She is the one who got away. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and it is his grief and not yours. You carry it three steps into the field anyway.

Then Sunday. A pew, the smell of wax, his mother's rosary clicking. Then the sourness of the plant's break room. Then a bank balance he checks and does not like. It is small, a life with nothing to its name, and it is still entirely whole. The first fat drop of rain hits your forehead, warm, and the grass bends flat toward you in one long breath. Your calves are tight, your back is a little tired, and your heart goes steady under the hoodie.

You lift your hands. They are brown, broad across the knuckle, nicked and callused, and you have never seen them before. You turn them over. Then you look up, into the weather, into whoever is watching, and you say, "Well. Hello, Ismael."

The thunder answers a moment late. You chew, and you wonder how long this one will hold you, and when the hunger comes back, and whether tomorrow you will still be this man.