Ismael Cortez

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The kitchen has already gone quiet by the time you're in it — everyone home, the fry oil cooling in its vats somewhere down the block, and you are standing in Colin's narrow galley apartment holding his phone, sixty seconds into being him and already restless with it. Blond hair. Brown eyes. A beauty mark you keep catching in the microwave's reflection like it belongs to someone else, because it does. You spun for him and got a line cook, and a line cook is nothing, a line cook is a body that smells like burnt garlic no matter how long it showers. One minute. That's all it took to know. The wheel owes you better than this and you are not a patient man, five hundred and twenty-eight spins in — you have stopped pretending patience is a virtue you still have. You open the laptop already on the counter, log into vessel.cards with fingers that aren't shaped like they should be yet, and you spin.

The wheel doesn't ask if you're sure.

You come up mid-reach, fingers already closed around a cold steel latch, and the whole world smells like rain that hasn't fallen yet. Ozone and wheat dust. A hand — his hand — is heavier than Colin's, thicker through the knuckles, and it is already doing something, already three-quarters through pulling a container door handle toward locked, and you almost let it slip because for a half-second nobody is driving. Then you catch it. You finish the motion wrong, feel it be wrong, and do it again, slow, correct, watching your own arm like it belongs to a stranger giving a demonstration. It does. It did.

The vest is orange, heavy with grime worked into the weave, and touching its zipper pull gives you a morning — his morning, hours behind this one but arriving anyway, unbothered by whether it makes sense — him tugging the zipper up under a porch light before dawn, the baby still asleep, his wife's voice from the bedroom telling him to eat something before he goes, and him saying he will and not doing it. The gloves tucked in his back pocket are stiff with old sweat, and they give you calluses: hands that know a cargo hook by feel, that have learned exactly how much give a chain has before it doesn't. He's good at this. Ten thousand identical motions and his body stopped needing his mind for any of them years ago, which is why the check you just ran, the double-take on a task that never asked for one, feels so wrong sitting in him — like a man patting his pocket for keys he's held his whole life.

The hard hat's brim throws a line of shadow and touching its strap gives you the day he got it — company orientation, a supervisor with a clipboard, him nineteen and trying to look like he belonged on a dock this big, coming from a town where the only thing that touched the sky was grain elevators. Kansas landlocked and shipping anyway, containers hauled down from the rail yard, the dock built where the wheat used to be — he thought that was funny once, told his wife, she didn't laugh the way he wanted. He'd met her three years after that, at a cousin's wedding, and married her two years after the day he stopped seeing the other one — the one who still surfaces sometimes at two in the morning on shifts like this, not because he wants her back but because guilt doesn't check a clock. The wedding band is warm from his skin already and it gives you the vow, the hall, his mother crying in a dress the color of wet clay.

There's a kid somewhere behind all of it — a photo in his wallet you haven't touched yet, a small mouth, a name you haven't caught — and a number that lives under his ribs at night, the debt, bigger than the house could ever be worth, bigger than the overtime can close, and he does not talk about it, not to her, not to anyone, he just takes the shift and the next one and the thunderhead climbing black over the stubble like it climbs most Saturdays this time of year, and he keeps his eyes on the latch because the latch is the only thing that has ever asked something of him and given something back in the same motion.

You look down. The hand is brown, scarred faint across two knuckles, a plain gold band catching what's left of the light before the storm eats it. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real, like it could be anything else.

"Almost had that one," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if you mean the latch.