Luis Palomares

You are standing at a sink in Western Kansas, in a man who has been yours for under a minute, and already the beard is a nuisance. It is early, the house is dark, and his silver-streaked chin is wet from the tap. You look at the face in the mirror, small and heavy, and feel nothing for it. He has a mid-level job, a phone full of people who need things, and a short body that does not reach the top shelf. He could not carry what you wanted today. You wanted to be carried. So you thumb the page, and the wheel turns, and Sione Taufa goes out of you like a held breath.

Light. A bar of it lies hot across your face, and you were turned away from it, and now you are not. Your eyes are open into the glare and you do not blink. A mattress under your back. Boots off, on the carpet. The room is a held breath of daytime behind foil, and the lamp is still on.

The first thing you know is the leg. It is bouncing on its own against the bedspread, and you let it.

The hoodie is against your throat, zipped halfway, and when you drag the zipper its teeth give you a morning: a bathroom at dusk, a man's thick fingers fumbling the tab because he is tired in the particular way of the night shift, and the smell of cardboard dust. His wife's voice through the door, *don't wake the kids, Lu.* He stood there and loved her and did not say it.

The trousers are stiff at the knee. Under your thumb a seam, and behind it a loading door at three a.m., the trailer mouth yawning, boxes stacked to the ceiling by hand. Forty pounds, forty pounds, forty pounds. His lower back remembers every one of them. It aches like a coin pressed into the bone. You are five foot six and he has made that enough for a living.

The wedding band is cool. You turn it with your thumb. A church, a hot day, a woman laughing as it caught on her knuckle. Then, behind that, uninvited, another woman, one who got away, standing at a bus stop in a yellow coat while he said nothing. That one is his. He kept it folded small and you unfold it by accident, and you feel the old ache, not yours.

The mattress smells like him, sweat and detergent. Somewhere in the house there are two children, and the debt, and the number he does not say aloud, *twenty-five thousand under*. A rosary hangs from the lamp, and your fingers know the beads before you do.

You lift your arm into the bar of light. The fine-line geometry on the inner forearm lies there like a drawing of something that has not happened yet. A small ring of metal sits in the cartilage of your ear. Your jaw is smooth. Your hands, his hands, scarred at the knuckles by cardboard and cold, open and close.

You turn the right one over, look at the palm, and look up.

"Okay," you say, in his low, rough voice. "Hello, Luis."

Down the hall a child coughs, and the leg keeps bouncing, and you wonder how long before the wanting comes back.