Liam Gorecki

Oscar Benítez is a good body. Short, compact, a painter's shoulders, and a scar through the eyebrow that I have learned to feel like a second thought. I have been him for under a minute. I stand in a stranger's kitchen in Los Angeles, in the middle of the night, with a paint-stiff rag in my fist, and I cannot make the quiet mean anything. His house is asleep. His refrigerator hums. I opened the cabinet to find what a man like him eats, and it was only cans, and my thumb went to the site on its own. Nothing is wrong with him. He is five-five and the shelves are all too high. I am tired of reaching. Pay, spin.

Sheets. The first thing is the cotton against my cheek, damp where my mouth was open. My breath drags ragged through a stuffed nose and then, in one pull, it evens out. My arm hangs off the mattress, the knuckles almost brushing carpet. I draw it up. The body rolls onto its back and my hands fold at the chest, like a man laid out. He has never once slept like this. I can feel the strangeness of it in the muscles, a stiffness that isn't mine.

Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains, sodium orange, and lies across my chest. I am long. Five-ten, and the feet reach the end of the bed with room to spare. Skinny: I feel the hip bones against the mattress, the ribs lifting under the hoodie he fell asleep in. The cotton is soft and washed thin, and the cuff at my wrist gives me something. It is a Thursday, sleeves pushed up, a lawn, a laptop hot on his knees, his leg going the way it always goes, bouncing, bouncing. He bought the hoodie secondhand and wore it until the elbows went. He pulled it on that morning over yesterday's shirt because the radiator was dead. I feel the cold floor under his bare feet, and my own leg, lying still, wants to jump.

I turn my head. Beard against the pillow, short and neat, the hair on top long and tangled, the sides clipped to nothing. My fingers find it. A flash: the bathroom mirror, the clippers, his tongue between his teeth, proud of the hard line he cut. Under the phone on the floor is a bill, and I know it before I see it: the number is twenty-odd thousand, and it sits in his stomach like a swallowed stone. He lies awake with it some nights. Not tonight. Tonight he was out cold. A rosary hangs on a hook, his grandmother's, and I know without touching it that he prays badly and anyway.

I lift my hands into the orange light. They are pale, freckled, long-fingered, a stranger's, and they are mine. The leg jumps once under the blanket. I turn them over, and I look up.

"Okay," I say, in his voice. "Hi."

The radiator knocks. How long does this one last? I flex his fingers and wait to feel the wanting come back.