Lorenzo Mark Ibáñez

You are Cody Wayne Pritchard, and you have been him for one minute.

It is a minute of good things. The knees don't ache. The shoulders hang loose. The light through the blinds is the early gray before an Atlanta Wednesday, and the beard under your palm is thick and dense. The unibrow, you noticed in the mirror, makes everyone look worried or about to lie. You were handed twenty-nine and strong and you stood there with it, and you wanted something else already.

That's the part you won't say out loud. Nothing is wrong with him. He is a carpenter, and a carpenter's hands are a closed question: you know what they will do before you ask. You wanted a body that didn't know what you were going to want. So you pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down its teeth, slows, and stops on a man.

Then you are standing up, and the blinds and the beard are gone.

Cold, first. Refrigerated air from somewhere, concrete through the soles of the boots, a fluorescent hum. Your left hand is flat on the corner of a cardboard case, and your right is a few inches off another, midway through a motion you did not begin. Your breath comes heavier than the last body's. Your gut sits against the belt. The head is bare and cool. You were reaching, and for half a second your hand does the wrong thing, closing on air. You pull it back and do it slowly. Grip the case, lift, turn, set it on the shelf, square the label. Then the next one. And the next. You check each one, and you don't know why you need to.

The vest first. Its cloth is stiff at the pocket seams, and where your thumb catches the zipper pull the morning arrives. It's his hands, not yours, working it up over the black long-sleeve in a dark apartment, careful not to wake anyone. A child's shoe in the hall that he nudges aside with his foot. The wife's breath through the bedroom door. He pulls the sleeves down over his wrists because the stockroom is cold, and he likes that they're soft.

The cutter on the lanyard knocks your sternum when you breathe. You close your fingers around it and get a whole winter: the first week on this job, a box he opened too fast, a red line across his knuckle that bled into a case of beans. He was forty-one. He felt stupid and kept going. He has used the blade slowly ever since, and the slowness is love, a little, for the two people who need him to keep all ten fingers.

The glove in your right hand is leather, stiff with old sweat. It gives you his daughter, small, asking why he works when it's dark. He said, "So the store is ready when you wake up." It was the best thing he'd ever said and he hadn't planned it.

Your thumb finds the ring. The band is warm and a little tight against the knuckle. It brings the wife, a long laugh in a kitchen, a lease signed, forgiveness for something small. Behind that, fainter, an old girlfriend in a parked car, a goodbye that never quite finished. It sits in him like a splinter he decided to keep.

Your teeth want your thumbnail. The nails are bitten to the pink, and you know it's his, a habit he performs on every break and never notices. Your back aches low and dully. The calves are strong from years of floor. There's money somewhere, a small savings he checks sometimes the way you check a pulse.

You look down. The hand is square, brown, thick-knuckled, the ring pressing a pale groove. You turn it over. Then you look up at the aisle, the blue dark in the dock door, and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The wanting is already there, small, patient, asking whether you are still him tomorrow.