Leonard Whitehorse

You are standing in Rafael Ibarra's kitchen in Nashville, and you have been him for less than a minute. The linoleum is cold through his socks. His body is thin and light and wants nothing, and that is the trouble. You pour water you don't drink. His green eyes are in the dark window over the sink, and the beauty mark. You thought you wanted a body that was young and quick. It is quick. It is also a man between jobs, with a phone that holds nothing for him, and you already know all of it. There was nothing left in him to find out. Tonight the wanting came back the way hunger does, from underneath. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are on your side in the dark with a pillow under your ear and blue light on one cheek. A phone sits six inches from your face. Your thumb has stopped mid-scroll, and the next second belongs to you. It starts again, faster and steadier than whatever stopped it, flicking past everything he lingered on.

The phone goes first. The glass is warm from a long hold, and your thumb knows the glide of it. A photograph surfaces: two kids on a stoop in wet light, one with a missing tooth. His feeling arrives, not yours, a swell with a hook in it. Then the plaid flannel against your ribs, soft from washing. His wife bought it. The memory comes sleeve by sleeve, his fingers working the buttons that morning in the closet's dark. She laughed that he buttoned it wrong. She had been dead a year, and he buttoned it wrong on purpose and fixed it.

The ring is next. Your right thumb turns it on your left hand and a whole afternoon opens. A county clerk's office. Her hand shaking. His own hands, steady, because steady was his job. Under it runs the long work of a life: thirty years of someone else's building codes and cold mornings. A foreman who never learned his name right. The money came slowly and then all at once, and he never spent it on anything that showed. Nobody knows he still drives past the old reservation road on Sundays and does not stop.

The body underneath is fifty-five and honest. There is a dull ache low in the left hip, the sheets are tangled at your shins, and your jaw is smooth. The shave was last night's ritual, one he kept for her. Your mouth wants something between the teeth. The hand goes to the nightstand on its own and finds a toothpick, and you chew it, an old cigarette's ghost. The lamp's glow holds on the wall. Through the window comes the hiss of tires on a wet street.

You lower the phone to your chest. You lift your left hand into the light and turn it over, the ring catching, the palm broad and creased and unfamiliar.

You look up, past the screen, at nobody, at everything.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."