Marco Delgado

You are still Thomas Rudnick for another few seconds, and Thomas Rudnick has been standing at his kitchen window for most of a minute with the kettle ticking behind him. Chicago is dark and the glass shows you a gray moustache and the gap between his front teeth. His knees hurt on the stairs. His reading glasses are on his head, and his wife's name is on a magnet that he doesn't know how to feel about. He is fine. He is a perfectly good accountant. And it was the ledger that did it. You opened it at the desk, the numbers lined up, and you understood that you could already see how this life ended, in tidy columns, a long time from now. You had wanted a man who didn't know yet. The gap in the teeth was the last thing you touched. You pay. You spin.

Then you are sitting on the edge of a bed with your hand lifted toward your collar.

The room is lamplit and the window is the blue of before-anything. Your thumb and finger are pinched on a button that is in the wrong hole, and the shirt hangs crooked by one. The tie is loose around your neck. You stop, and your hand goes flat on your chest. Under it there are ribs, and a heart going fast and young. You hold still and feel it knock against your palm.

The cuff is the first thing that gives. Cotton, slightly stiff, a little sour at the wrist, and it brings a morning back that is his and not yours. He stood at a sink in a cold bathroom with a pouch tucked under his lip, the mint burning, and he thought *don't be late again*. The shirt was the clean one, the only one, ironed on a towel on the floor. Sleeve first, left, then right. He did the buttons fast because he was already behind, and he skipped one.

You undo them, and they go back up correctly. Your fingers know the way without being asked. You rub the tie between finger and thumb and a different year opens. A girl laughed in a kitchen as she knotted it for him, and said it was too thin for him and that he looked like he was lying. She was the ex. He had been trying all week not to text her. He still does not understand what he did. Hurt sits behind his sternum like a swallowed stone. The knot comes out of your hands in a shape this closet has never seen, a stranger's knot, quick and flat. Thomas learned it in 1983.

Your socks are on carpet that is rough and cold. That brings a night, a bottle, a floor, and a phone that wouldn't light. Hands that came apart picking at the cuticle until it bled. You look and the thumb is raw. The scotch is still in you, a dull sourness at the back of the jaw. He drinks too much and he knows it, in the way you know a debt you don't open the envelope for. Eleven thousand dollars sits somewhere in his accounts, and the rest is lanyard and hope. There is a hotel lobby coming, with handshakes and a name tag that will have to be pinned straight. He is good at the first ninety seconds of a stranger. He is five foot five and he has learned to stand like more. Your back is broad enough, your legs are strong. Nothing hurts in him but the one stone.

Out there the garage door grinds below the window. The steep driveway is cold under a white light, and somewhere in him is the sense that something larger watches, kind and not particularly interested. Spiritual, he'd say, not religious. He would have prayed this morning if he had known how to start.

You look at your hands. They are brown, quick, and chewed at the edges. You turn them over, and they are yours.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, to the face, and say, "Okay, Marco. Let's see how long you last."

You do not know how long this one lasts. The wanting is quiet now. It will come back, and you can already feel it listening.