Mateo Quispe

You are standing at a lathe in a shop in Ohio, wearing a machinist's forearms, and you have just made a part wrong on purpose. Brian Kessler's calipers are still in your right hand. A micrometer reads true. You hold it a moment longer than you need to. The man has been yours for less than a minute and already he is too much: the good shoulders, the steady fingers, the tidy competence that asks nothing of you. It is Tuesday afternoon here, the coolant smells like warm pennies, and somewhere a radio plays a ballgame. You wanted a body that could do things. You have one. What sends you back is that it does them without you. The wheel pays you in surprise, and he has none left. You set the calipers down, thumb the phone awake, and spin.

Then it is morning, and you are on a bench.

Your forearms rest on your knees. Your breath, which was blowing through your teeth, goes quiet. There is a water bottle sweating on the concrete beside your shoe. The room is cold and smells of rubber mats and cardboard, and the window at the end holds white Anchorage daylight. You are small now, and light, and your legs are folded closer to the floor than any legs you have worn lately.

Your hands hang between your knees. Something small and metal sits in the right one, a ring, and the fingers are already turning it over without being told.

The ring opens first. It is not his, it is a gift, and his thumb knows the warmth it has held. A girl's laugh in a parked car, her cold nose against his cheek. His dimples go deep at the memory, you can feel them pull. He loves her plainly, the way you love weather.

The sweatshirt sleeves under your fingertips are cotton, worn thin at the cuffs. A morning comes through them: the grey long-sleeve pulled off a chair in a dark room, one arm and then the other, the hem tugged down over a stomach that never fills out. Navy pants, belt pulled to the last hole. Canvas shoes laced fast, the left lace knotted twice because it keeps slipping. Class at noon, a laptop with a cracked corner, a loan balance he does not look at. Underwater, always, in a way that sits in the chest like a swallowed stone. His mother crossing herself over his head in a doorway. Mass smell, wax and wool.

The bench is rough under your thighs. Splinters catch. Through them comes a year of lifting alone in a back room of this building, small, skinny, stubborn, adding five pounds and failing and adding them again. The little barbell in his eyebrow pulls cold when you frown. He pierced it at eighteen on a dare he gave himself.

Your shoulders ache pleasantly, a deep tired heat. Your heart runs fast and young. Everything in this body is quick to burn and quick to mend.

You raise your hands and look at them. They are narrow, brown, scuffed at the knuckles, the ring turning there. You close them. They close.

You stand, and the floor is farther down than you expect. Under the rack the bar waits, two inches wider than he ever gripped it.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is higher and softer than you meant. "Let's see how long you last."

Nobody answers. Somewhere a bell of plates clangs. You do not know whether this is an hour or a year, and your hand, turning the ring, doesn't either.