Marcos Villanueva

You are standing at a proofing rack in a bakery before the day has started. Nolan Brzezinski's forearms are dusted white to the elbow. His beard is full of flour, and his left eye drifts off true whenever he's tired. It is tired now. You have worn him for less than a minute, and you already know what the problem is. The oven is ticking as it heats, the dough is rising under its cloths, and none of it is yours to want. You wanted something with a different weight. You press a floury thumb to the phone and the wheel turns, and Nolan's kitchen is gone.

Plastic under you. Strip light humming overhead. The board reads 47, then it clicks to 48, and the knee that was bouncing stops on that same click. You didn't stop it. His body did, and now it's yours. You set the paper cup down square on the seat beside you. The water has gone warm. You fold your hands.

A name is called, and it's his. You don't look up.

The jacket comes first. Canvas, stiff at the cuffs, the collar rough against your neck. Pulling it tighter, you get a morning: Marcos in a hallway, one arm in this sleeve, his wife's voice from the kitchen asking if he ate. He hadn't. He zipped the pocket over his keys and felt braced for something, and he doesn't know what. The undershirt under it is cold at the small of your back. It was folded that morning by someone else, and the creases are still there against your skin.

The jeans hold your thighs. They are thick, short-legged, and made for a man who is five-three and all muscle, a man who has spent years making up for what he lacks in height. Your shoulders are heavy and strong, and the knee that stopped is sore. Under your right thumb, the pen in your jacket pocket. The click is automatic, and it hits something. A lot's edge at dusk, a patrol car warm against his back, the pen going click, click while he waited for a radio to say anything at all. Then a kitchen, and a woman he's no longer allowed to call. Her name is somewhere under his tongue. He is married, and he was not supposed to still be thinking of her.

The ring is cool and a little loose from the cold. It carries his wedding day, thin and bright, with a ceiling fan turning above and the red dirt of the yard tracked in on everyone's shoes. It carries last night too, his wife asleep on her side of the bed while he lay awake, doing sums with no end. The ceiling has a stain. The roof has rust. Money goes out faster than it comes in, and the number never closes. He sat in this chair for something, a form or a fee or a letter, and the memory slides away when you reach for it. That is all of him you get.

You look at your hands. They're square and scarred only by work, and one of them wears a plain band. You turn them over. They are warm. They are not Nolan's, and you will not be going back to the oven.

You look up. The door is open and a clerk is waiting.

"Forty-eight," you say, in a voice that is slower and lower than any you've had. You wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting comes back.