Javier Lozoya

You are Ezra, twenty-four, and you hate his hands.

You have been him six minutes and already you know why: the boxing gym smells like other men's sweat baked into canvas, and the beauty mark on his jaw itches in a way that isn't itching, it's just wrongness sitting on skin that isn't yours, on a body that peaked at nineteen and has been sliding since. You spun into a kid with a whole life still ahead of him and all you can feel is how much of it is spoken for — a girlfriend who calls him babe in a voice that grates, a gym owner who owes him money and won't say when, a left knee that clicks on the stairs. Six minutes and you already want out. You did not come here for a life. You came here to keep not having one, over and over, in whoever the wheel hands you, and this one is loud with wanting things you don't want.

So you pull out your phone — his phone, warm from his pocket — and you open vessel.cards, and the wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, because you decided a long time ago, the first time, the four hundred and thirteenth time.

It lands.

—

The hold music finishes its loop and starts again, tinny against your collarbone, and your shoulder — not your shoulder, his — drops the phone into a hand that is already closing around it. The pen stops on the second digit of a reference number, ink pooled slightly where it waits. You are standing at a kitchen counter under a bell-shaped light, and the ceiling is low and ordinary and nothing like a gym.

You are shorter now. Rounder in the middle. Bald where a moment ago there was hair to not-think about. Your eyebrow has a seam in it that your fingers already know is there without checking.

—

The shirt is what starts it — an olive t-shirt gone soft at the collar, and putting it on this morning comes back through the fabric like a hand laid flat on your chest: Javier standing in the bedroom, wife still asleep, easing the shirt over his head slow so the hanger wouldn't clatter against the closet door and wake her, because she works the early shift Tuesdays and this was a Monday, one more night of her sleeping in. Small thing. He does it every morning he can.

The tool belt on the floor by the door — you're not wearing it now, it's evening, he's home — but its memory is in his hip anyway, the phantom drag of it, the callus worn into the pad of his palm from the crimpers, from twenty years of them. Under a half-finished ceiling this morning, conduit running silver overhead, kneeling on a folded towel because his knees don't forgive concrete like they used to. A guy on the crew, younger, calling him Javi and meaning it with respect, not diminishment. That felt good today. That still feels good, arriving secondhand into your chest like something borrowed that fits.

The envelope under your hand — the pen still resting on it — is a hospital billing thing, a reference number for a claim about his blood pressure medication, and touching it gives you the doctor's office in March, the cuff too tight, the number higher than he expected, his wife in the waiting room reading something on her phone and looking up when he came out, her face already asking. He didn't want to worry her. He told her it was fine. It mostly is.

The wedding band is cool and then warm, the way metal goes once it's been on skin fifteen years, and it opens wider than the rest — not one memory but the whole shape of one: her name is Marisol, and the wedding was in her mother's backyard in July, unbearable heat, his mother crying before the vows even started. No kids, and that had been a wound once, a specific year of specialists and calendars and a bathroom trash can he stopped looking in, and then it had scarred over into something else, a life with just the two of them in it, dense and unremarkable and good. There's an ex too, further back, a name that surfaces without asking — Priscilla — and with her a version of himself at twenty-six he doesn't visit often, and doesn't now either, just touches and lets go, the way you'd touch a door you have no reason to open.

The phone against your ear is still looping its hold music, and under your ribs there's an ache that isn't the phone's fault — his blood pressure, the quiet thing his doctor watches and his wife doesn't know the numbers of, sitting in him the way weather sits in a low sky, present, not urgent, not today.

His hand, still holding the pen, wants to go to his mouth. You feel the want arrive before you understand it — his teeth already know the shape of this thumbnail, worn down past where a nail should end. A habit he does at the sink, at red lights, on hold exactly like this. Thirty seconds ago, before you, he was two seconds from doing it.

Church on Sundays, most Sundays, Marisol's hand finding his on the pew without either of them looking. A body that drinks maybe four times a year and always regrets the fifth. Hands that have never held a cigarette and never wanted to. A body built compact and dense, five-five and used to being underestimated by taller men on job sites until they see what he can lift.

None of this is yours. All of it is right here, close as skin, and none of it is yours.

—

You look at the hand holding the pen. It is not a hand you have ever seen before this exact loop of hold music, and yet the thumbnail is already bitten short, already familiar to a body that hasn't finished being new.

You lift your eyes off it, into the kitchen light, past the fridge covered in someone else's magnets and a school photo of a niece who isn't yours to love yet.

"Reference number," you say, out loud, to no one, testing the voice — his voice, low, a little rough at the edges from talking over a compressor all day — and something in you, some old counted rhythm, is already asking, quiet underneath it, how long before the wheel calls you back, and whether Javier will still be standing in this kitchen when it does.