Ismael Barraza

You are standing in Liam Gorecki's boots in a stairwell that smells of bleach and wet mop, six-three and good in the shoulders, a full red beard you have stopped noticing, and you have been him for less than a minute. The phone is already in your hand. The cart is parked below you and the building is still dark. Nothing is wrong with him. He mops well. His back is fine, his dimples are fine, and his name is stitched over the pocket. But the stairwell is quiet and the quiet has a hole in it, and you know the shape of the hole. So you thumb the site open, and the wheel is there, and you pay.

It turns. Liam's breath goes out of you mid-sentence.

Dark. Your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone warm and damp, and your breath is coming ragged, a snore catching on itself. Then it evens out in one pull. Your arm hangs off the mattress, heavy as a sandbag, and the blood has gone out of the fingers. You draw it up. The body rolls onto its back by itself, and your hands fold on your chest. Somebody sleeps like this in a coffin, or in a church. It is not how he sleeps. You can feel the groove his body wore into the mattress on the other side, the face-down shape of him, and you are lying outside it.

Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains in a thin cold stripe. Neon is bleeding in from the alley below, pink and then blue, and somewhere a bass line thumps through a wall. It is the middle of the night here and every window is dark, so he must work days or something close to it. Nobody is awake. The sheets are knotted around your shins.

The T-shirt is the first thing that talks. Cotton worn soft, tight under the arms, and the collar has stretched from years of being pulled. Your thumb finds the hem and the memory comes in his feeling, not yours: a Sunday, the shirt pulled over his head in a hurry, his wife laughing at him from the doorway because he is late for Mass again. The late-morning light is yellow in that memory. His daughter's shoe is lost under the couch. He is happy, plainly and stupidly happy, and the happiness has no idea it is being borrowed.

The ring comes next. Your right thumb turns it on your left hand, and the band is smooth and a little loose from the cold. He has done this a thousand times on the mezzanine, above the floor, with the forklifts beeping below and the clipboard under his arm. He turns it when a count is wrong. He turns it when he is afraid of a number. There is a trailer of product missing, and a district manager, and a night when he sat in the truck with the engine off. And under that there is her. Not his wife. The other one, the recent one, a name he does not say even inside his own head. She ended it in a parking lot in the rain, and he drove home and stood in the kitchen and did not wake anyone. Nothing in this body is allowed to forget it.

The body underneath it all is fifty-one. The lower back has a dull ache that sleep has not touched. The knees are stiff when you bend them. There is a thickness at the middle that he has been meaning to do something about. The hands feel strong and practiced, calloused across the palms from rails and pallet wrap, and they want something to hold, a cigarette maybe. He quit years ago. The wanting is still in the fingers, a small tapping hunger, and you let it tap.

Down the hall a child coughs in her sleep and turns over. The house breathes. Two children, a wife, a mortgage, and a name on a door. All of it is asleep and all of it is yours to stand in, and none of it knows.

You lift your left hand into the stripe of streetlight and turn it over. Freckles run down the wrist. The ring catches the light. Then you look up at the dark ceiling and say, quietly, "Hello, Ismael." It sounds like a stranger's name in a stranger's mouth, and the mouth is warm. You wonder how long he will stay yours, whether the wanting comes back by breakfast, or before the clock turns over, or now.