Marcos Ibarra

You are nineteen and you are tired of it already. Emilio Contreras has a cleft chin that you keep finding with your thumb, and a ledger open on a screen, and a Tuesday morning that will not end. Fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes of being thin and careful, of numbers that balance, of a boss who says his name like a question. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. That is the trouble. Something happened in the elevator on the way up, a stranger's laugh from a floor you will never visit, and you wanted a laugh that was yours to make with a body that could chase it. The wheel is already open in the other tab. You pay. You spin. Emilio's hand leaves the mouse and does not come back.

Cold. That is first: cold air going into a chest that is already working, and your feet are in the air, and then one foot is not where it should be. The stumble starts and never lands. You catch it on the other foot, and the running goes on without asking you. Arms lower. Head still. Breath is a white rag in front of your face. A canal runs beside you, wide and dry and concrete, with a thread of water down its throat, and the sky over the fences is the color of the inside of a shell. Something buzzes on your left wrist. A split you never ran.

The jacket first. Zipper tab against your chin, cold metal, and the sleeve cuffs, worn thin at the thumbs. He pulled these on in the dark, one arm and then the other, in a bedroom that smelled of solder and old coffee, trying not to wake nobody because there was nobody. He lives alone in a stucco courtyard where the palms are dry and rattle. He stood at the sink and drank water out of his hand.

The shoes. Each footfall comes up through the heel into the knee, a small honest ache, left side worse. Thirty years old, and the body knows it, but it is strong: calves like rope, lungs wide. He ran this path because it cost nothing. He is scraping by, and he counts it in his head every month, the way he counts boxes of wire nuts.

The earbud sits in your ear, a song you do not know, and with it comes a woman. A kitchen. She is laughing at him because he rewired her lamp and it worked and he could not stop grinning. Then the same kitchen with the light off, and her suitcase by the door, and him saying nothing, which was the whole mistake. She got away. He still runs past her street sometimes and pretends it is the route.

The watch face is lit at mile four. Your right hand comes up to it on its own and the thumbnail goes to your teeth. Bitten short, ragged, a habit older than her. The nail tastes of salt and cold. He has been quitting cigarettes for three years and this is where the wanting went. Under the nail, a gray rim of the job: copper, drywall, a ceiling half finished, conduit strung overhead like ribs. He loves that, the moment the line runs true. Nobody ever tells you that. One of your eyes wanders outward when you are tired, he knows, he has seen it in mirrors, and he learned long ago to look people in the face anyway.

The ground is hard. The air tastes like metal and dust and the beginning of a day.

You slow. You hold up your hands in the pink light and turn them over, the knuckles scarred by work and not one scar of it a mark, only wear. They are broad and warm and not yours. Your breath smokes. You look up and the one eye drifts, and you let it.

"Okay, Marcos," you say. "Show me what you've got."

The watch buzzes again. Somewhere a tab is open. You do not know how long this lasts, whether the wanting comes back by lunch, or tonight, or never, and you stand in the cold, listening for it.