Jacob Feldmann

You are standing in a kitchen in Philadelphia before the light, in Rubén Castañeda's body, and your knees hurt. They have hurt since the first minute. The skinny man's hip clicks when he leans on the counter. The coffee he made tastes of the pan. His unibrow itches when you frown, and you have been frowning at the window for a while, at the trucks already idling on the street. You wanted a body that worked, and this one does. It is only that you have already been inside it. You know where everything is. You know there is nothing in it you haven't already opened, and the wanting has come back, flat and plain, like hunger at a table you have already cleared. You put the cup down. You don't finish it.

The wheel turns, and the kitchen goes.

Wet air. Cold on the face, warm in the chest, and the ground is not where it should be. A kerb drops under the left foot and you pitch forward, and a hand slaps down on a parked car's cold wet roof. The metal is slick. Your heart is going hard and slow, heavy with beer. The scuff that was in the walking stops, because you have put both feet down flat.

The jacket is first. Canvas, stiff at the cuffs, the collar rubbing his neck, and your fingers find the zipper pull and he is there. It is a Tuesday morning in a bathroom in a stranger's house, kneeling, the cabinet door against his ear, and a woman saying *take your time* in a voice that means *hurry*. The trap won't break loose. He does it with the heel of his hand and a word his grandmother would not have liked, and it gives, and he is proud of it for no reason he could ever say out loud. The pride is warm, and it is his, and it goes through you like swallowing something hot.

You start walking, because the car is cold, and the jeans pull at the thigh. The waistband sits under a belly he carries like a bag of sand. Another flash: his mother's kitchen, Friday, the candles lit, and him at the end of the table, too big for the chair, being told to eat. He ate. There is a tenderness in it so ordinary it hurts. Under your lip there is a pinch of something, tobacco gone stale against the gum, and his tongue knows it, and you taste the can in his back pocket before you think of it.

The beard is thin and patchy against your palm when you wipe your mouth. He hates it. He has been growing it for three months, and the cheeks still show through, and a girl once laughed. She wasn't cruel. It was a long time ago and it still lives in the jaw. Her name rises and doesn't quite arrive. You feel the shape of it, soft, like a coat left on a chair.

Your boots land even and quiet. The street is closed shops and a lamp with a halo of mist. Ahead is a corner, and you take it left, away from the bed he would have fallen into, because the wheel wants something it hasn't had. The savings are in him too: a number, a small sacred number, a thing he checks like a pulse. You don't know the home you are walking away from. You only know the ache in his shoulders, a good ache, earned.

You lift your hands into the light of the lamp. They are thick, broad, nicked with work, the calluses hard along the base of the fingers, and they close without being asked, the way they close on a wrench. You turn them over. Nothing is written on them.

You look up.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and a little thick. "Okay. Let's see what you've got."

The street says nothing. You wonder how long this one will fit, and when the wanting comes.