Ismael Torres Barrientos

You are standing in a Buenos Aires evening, in a security guard's body, and you have been him for less than a minute. Osvaldo's knees ache from the walk to the desk. His brown eyes are tired, and the beauty mark itches when you touch it. You stand there in his uniform and understand that you are already bored. The body works. It is fine. But you have a hunger the wheel put in you, and the page is open, and his thumb is already over the button. Nobody sent you back. You decide it yourself, the way you always do.

You spin.

The plate is under your fingers. Heat comes up from the pass, and there is a smear of sauce on the rim. Your hand has just done something wrong: the tweezers, the garnish, a half-second slip, a sprig set crooked. You do it again, slowly, and it is right. Ten more follow, each one checked, though this hand has not needed checking in years. Light white as a sheet is pouring through the window. Outside is a house on posts, a rusted tin roof, a yard of red dirt.

The jacket first. Cotton, stiff with old grease, cuffs rolled twice. It remembers the morning: his thumb pushing each button through, the middle one loose on its thread, and a promise to fix it that he has made for a year. Two kids' drawings are taped inside a locker door. The ex, recently, standing in a doorway and saying something he did not answer.

The apron strings are tied across a belly that sits soft and heavy. He is short, so the counter meets him high on the ribs, and his shoulders have learned to hunch. Your feet are in clogs gone slick at the heel, and the arches burn. The fingers of your right hand drum the steel, a quick rhythm he does not know he has. They know the weight of a pan, the exact heat of a plate rim.

A pocket holds a pack and a vape. Touching them, you get the craving, sharp as a hook, and the back step behind the dumpster where he stands with it. Under it is something quieter: a rug unrolled on a bedroom floor at dusk, his forehead down, the only ten minutes that are wholly his. He quit drinking and it cost him a marriage-sized hole he never filled. The ink on his upper arm, the bird and anchor, was done at nineteen, in a cousin's garage, for a girl whose name he cannot now say without smiling.

His back is stiff. His scalp is tight where the hairline retreats. Somebody shouts for a table, and the body answers before you do.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Short fingers, a long scar along the wrist, the palm calloused. Yours now. You raise your eyes to the window and the red yard, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long."

The fingers drum once on the steel. You wonder how long this one will hold you, and when the wanting comes back.