Marcus Deleon

The pen is still between his fingers when you arrive, and for a second you and he are both holding it, both looking at the last letter of a name that isn't yours yet. Then the ring around his forehead opens and he's gone somewhere you don't follow, and it's just you, blinking under fluorescent light, in a body that fits like a rented suit.

The machine behind you ticks as it cools. Somebody in a lab coat says, "Mr. Deleon? You feeling alright?" and you say yes before you've decided to, because the mouth already knows how to be polite to strangers.

You find the truck in the gravel lot outside, dust settled on a windshield that hasn't been washed in a week. There's a car seat in the back, buckled empty, a juice box wedged in the cupholder gone warm. The lanyard around your neck says DELEON in block letters, some conference in Waco, badge photo taken with the eyebrow scar catching the flash wrong.

You drive because the hands know the road better than you do — a gravel stretch that turns to blacktop, barbed wire keeping nothing in or out for miles, a water tower standing up out of the flat land like a period at the end of a sentence. You pass a mailbox with DELEON stenciled on it in fading paint and something in the chest tightens that has nothing to do with you.

Inside, the wife is at the stove, not turning around yet. "You're early," she says, and you say something about the meeting running short, and it comes out easy, comes out true-sounding, because his voice already has the shape of these lies worked into it, the small domestic kind that keep a house standing. There's a boy at the table with a coloring book, maybe four, who doesn't look up but says "Daddy" like a fact already filed away.

You sit. The ring on your left hand catches the kitchen light. Upstairs a phone buzzes against a nightstand — you find it later, a name in the contacts saved without a last name, three unread texts glowing blue in the dark of the screen, the kind of messages that aren't about anything except that someone still wants to be missed. You don't answer them. That isn't yours to close or keep open.

At dinner the boy tells you about a dog he saw, and the wife tells you about a call from her sister, and you say the right things at the right pauses because some fossil layer of this man is still down there running the machinery of him, even with you standing on top of it. You catch yourself rubbing the scar through his eyebrow, an old habit apparently, muscle memory with no muscle behind it that's yours.

Later you stand at the bathroom mirror and roll up the sleeve to look at the lion inked into his arm, half-finished shading around the mane like whoever did it ran out of time or money. You think about the man who chose it, who sat still for the needle, who has a wife downstairs doing dishes and a text message upstairs he hasn't answered and a boy who says "Daddy" like gravity.

You do not know where he's gone while you're here. You hope, without being able to say why you'd hope anything for a stranger, that wherever it is, it's quiet, and that when he comes back into this house, into this scar, into this ring, he comes back to all of it still standing — the wife, the boy, the dog the kid keeps talking about, even the phone upstairs, blinking, waiting to be forgiven or answered, whichever he decides.

By morning the machine will want him back, the way machines want anything — without malice, only appetite. You'll sign nothing. You'll just be gone, and his hand will pick the pen back up like it never set it down, and finish the last letter of his own name.