Mateo Arroyo

Mateo Arroyo's story, as I take it:

Anil's feet ache the way a picker's feet ache at the end of a shift, a long fluorescent ache that has come up through the soles into the calves. I am sitting on the edge of his bed in Seattle with the lights off and his phone dark in his thin hands. Six minutes. That is how long I have been him. I had thought the skinny frame would feel like a clean room. Instead it feels like a coat cut for someone else. His shoulders are narrow and his knees are sharp. Every time I reach for something on a high shelf in my head, the body falls short by two inches. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. He would pick another thousand items tomorrow, and I do not want to be the one who does it. Something in me is already looking past this room, wanting someone with a different weight to stand in. So I open the page. The wheel is there, patient and bright. I pay. I spin. I let Anil go the way you let a stair go under your foot.

Then the kitchen is simply around me, with no travel and no warning.

My hands are on a table, flat, the fingers resting on warm laptop metal. A lamp burns to my left. The screen holds a woman's face, frozen mid-blink, her eyes half shut. In the corner is a small square with a man in it, and I understand that he is me. The timer keeps counting beneath her stopped face. My back is straight against a wooden chair. My socks are damp. My mouth is open slightly, and I close it.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, thin at the collar, against my shoulder blades. A morning arrives in his hands, not mine: he pulls it from a drawer that sticks, smells it for no reason, and puts it on over his head while the radiator knocks. He thinks, *wear black, black looks like a person with somewhere to be.* The feeling is a dull, stubborn hope.

The ring. It is cool and loose over a knuckle and it turns when I move my finger. And suddenly there is a woman at a sink with her back to him, laughing at something he said badly, and he stands there so full of her that he forgets the end of the sentence. He stutters when it matters, and with her it never mattered. Her name sits just out of reach. The warmth of it is not.

The mug on the table, ceramic, chipped at the rim. His thumb knows the chip. Coffee at the end of an interview that went wrong: a man across a desk, a pleasant voice, *we'll be in touch*, and the stammer coming up in his throat like a stair that isn't there. *Th-th-thank you.* The shame is hot and old and he swallows it with the coffee.

The laptop keys warm under my fingertips. A listing, then another. A number in a bank app, small enough to hold in one hand. He has been doing the arithmetic in his sleep. Under the arithmetic is something else, an old girlfriend's photograph he has not deleted, a summer, a car with the windows down. He does not look at it. He knows exactly where it is.

His hair falls against my forehead, stiff with dye that has faded toward the blue of a gas flame. He did that on a bad week, in a bathroom, with gloves, because he wanted to be a man something had happened to. My jaw is smooth and tight from a shave he took tonight so he would look employable to a stranger on a screen. My cheek has a small weight on it, the mole, high up, which he has always touched when he is nervous. I touch it.

The body underneath is easy to like. Good legs, a runner's lungs, a steady heart. Under that is a tired, honest fear.

I lift my hands from the keys and turn them over. The ring catches the lamp. They are not mine. They are the best ones I have had in a while.

I look up into the small lens and say, to the frozen woman and to whoever is there, "Hello." My voice tests its own volume. Then, quieter: "How long do I get you?"

The timer keeps counting.