Mateo Arellano

You are standing in Marcus Ellery's kitchen with the oven light on and flour still dried in the creases of his knuckles. He is six-three and everything in this room is built for him. Your hand reaches the top shelf without a stretch. His alarm is set for 3:40, and you have been here under an hour, which is the problem. You keep waiting to want the dough, the early dark, the quiet. You wanted it for a minute. Then it was just a tall man's work, and you were a long way up inside it.

The laptop is open on the counter, and the page is open on it. The wheel is already turning under your thumb. Nobody in this building is awake to see you do it.

Then it stops, and you are lying on your side in the dark.

The phone is six inches from your face and your thumb is still halfway through a flick. Blue light is on your cheek. The mattress is soft and sags under a belly that is warm and heavier than Marcus's ever was. Your weight rests on one hip. Your thumb moves again, faster, past a video of a man restoring a rusted knife and past a face you will never know. Your eyes are dry, because he had stopped blinking at some point.

Your own thumb is wrong under you. The nail on it is torn at the side, and the skin around it is raw. The cotton shirt is soft, and when you drag the hem down over your stomach it gives you a morning. He is pulling it off a chair in a hurry. It is the last clean black one. The sleeve catches on his wrist. He is thinking *Mom is going to ask, and I'll say I've applied to eleven places.* It is eight, not eleven. The shame of it sits under the feeling like a stone in a shoe.

The plaid pants are flannel and worn thin at the knee. They bring a different year, a girl's laugh in a doorway. She is wearing the other half of the set, and the pants are too long for her. A short, hard grief comes with it, and it is his, not yours. She left in the spring, and this is the first month he has stopped checking whether she looked at his story. Tonight, though, he had looked. That is what the thumb stopped on, a photo of her new porch light.

The pillow smells of laundry soap and of his own scalp. Under it the sheet has a faint ridge where he always lies. His other hand, the one under the phone, has been working at its cuticle. You feel the sting and the habit together, picking when he cannot say a thing. Below the sleeve, the inner forearm hums with a dull warmth where the tattoo is. A man's face is there in black and gray. You feel a hospital hallway, a rosary wound in a hand, a grandfather's weight going out of a bed, and him at eighteen being told to be brave. He had paid for it with two weeks of delivery money.

Down the hall a window glows. A rosary hangs from the lamp. Eighteen years of Sundays are in the knees. Everything hurts a little, like the ache of a person who has lain in one position too long. His lungs are deep, his heart is slow and stubborn, and his body is young.

You lift your hand off the screen. You turn it over, the torn nail and the chewed edge and the dark face of the old man on the arm. Then you look up, toward nothing, and you say, quietly, in a voice with a different grain than Marcus's, "Okay. Hello."

The phone goes dark against your chest. You do not know how long he lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether you will still be breathing this slowly by morning.