Josué Armando Peralta

You are standing in Caleb Rideout's kitchen with the light off, and the coffee has gone cold in his hand. Outside the window the road is gray and empty and a gull is working on something in the neighbor's trash. Sunday. His whole week sits in his shoulders like wet rope. Two minutes ago he was a man who had put the pot on. That's all he's been to you.

He hasn't done anything wrong. The shaved head is easy, the patchy beard is easy, and the back that knows how to lift is a good one. But you have worn twenty-two men, and you know now that the wanting does not come from the body. It comes from standing in a quiet room and noticing nothing is happening inside you. You open the site on his cracked phone. The wheel is already turning, and you press your thumb down.

The corridor arrives all at once. Your arms are already moving, and the mop is wrong in your hands. You've pushed it a hair too far, the stroke lands crooked, and you pull it back and do it again slowly, properly. Then you do the next ten the same way, each one checked, because you don't trust a body you've only just been given. Fluorescent light buzzes overhead. Past the glass doors the night is black and wet-green, and the air through the gap smells of cut grass and bleach.

Your shoulders are narrow, your weight is almost nothing, and your calves ache with a long standing ache. The stiff collar of the shirt scratches your neck.

The shirt gives you the first of him. It is the gray work shirt, and it comes with his hands doing the buttons in a dark room, quickly, so as not to wake the house. A tin roof ticks as it cools. A red dirt yard glares white in the morning. His mother's voice says *tu almuerzo* through a wall, and you feel his embarrassment at being twenty-three and still handed a lunch. He buttons the cuffs last. He does it every day, and it is a small ceremony.

The keys at his belt are heavy, and when your hand closes on them the memory is of locking doors behind teachers who never learned his name. He knows the ring by feel, and every key. One of them opens a room where he eats his dinner alone, with a paperback open on his knee. He is proud of that key and has told no one.

The mop handle gives you more. It is worn smooth in two places where his palms go, and the calluses are the shape of it. You get Sunday morning in a plain church with folding chairs. A hand lifts toward the ceiling. He believes, completely, and he is not performing. You get a girlfriend laughing at the back of a bus, her shoulder warm against his, and you feel how he saves up her small jokes to repeat at work, to nobody. You get a pack of cigarettes, his only vice, smoked in the dark behind the gym with a guilt that tastes like the smoke. You get the arithmetic of rent and a savings account that never gets past a number he keeps a secret from himself.

Your lungs are a little rough. Your hands are quick, and they know the corridor without you.

You lift your right hand off the handle and turn it over. It is brown and small-boned, with the lines of the handle pressed into the palm. It is not yours. It will be yours until it isn't. You look up into the dark glass at the end of the hall, at a face with curls, and you speak to it.

"Okay, Josué. Show me."

The light hums. You wonder how long you get, whether the wanting will wait until the floor is dry.