Matthew Sandoval Rourke

You are standing in a kitchen in Houston with a glass of water going warm in a hand that is not yours, and the evening is coming down gold through the blinds, and you are bored of being this man. It is not his fault. His knees are fine. His accounts are fine. The people on his phone say please and thank you. But at the end of this Monday you caught yourself looking at the pantry shelf for a full minute, and you understood that being the best-protected body in a room is a kind of being nowhere at all. You are 5'3" and wanted by everyone. You put the glass down. You spin.

Rain. It arrives before anything else, a hiss on the shelter roof and a cold needle on the backs of your hands. Afternoon, gray, the light flat and white. You are standing at the edge of the shelter with your weight forward onto the balls of your feet, and the sign above says 3 MIN, and you have already stepped, you realize, a beat early, out from under the roof. The hood is falling back. Runoff hits your forehead, your crooked nose, the short beard. You do not turn out of it. Your face is up in it, and it feels like someone who has been warm all his life being let off.

Then the jacket. The shoulders of it are wet and heavy, and the zipper pull is cold against your chin, and it opens a morning: the dark apartment, his girlfriend's breathing still slow in the next room, him pulling this jacket off the hook by its collar because the sleeve is stiff with last week's weather. He lingered at the door. He does not like leaving a warm bed, and he does it every day anyway.

The straps of the backpack bite into your shoulders. They give you the studio bag: a rolled towel, tape, a wrap for the right ankle. You know what the ankle is. You know the old ache in it as if it were an old argument. Under it the boots, laced the way he laces them, tight at the ankle and loose over the toes, because his toes are for gripping floor. Your toes want to spread inside the leather. They want a barre.

Your hand, without being told, goes up and touches your face. It finds the beard, the line of the jaw, then the bridge of the nose, and stops at the bend in it. A flash: a rehearsal years ago, an elbow he did not see, a white burst, and then laughing through blood because the lift had still landed. He kept dancing. They set the nose crooked in a clinic with a clock that ran slow, and he decided not to mind.

Your thighs are thick and quiet, the muscle of a man who jumps for a living. Your breath goes deep and low, easier than it ever went in Houston. Something behind your sternum is clean and sore, a day's work waiting to be done. A woman's name rises, not an ex's, the current one. She rolls her eyes when he stretches in the kitchen. Another name comes up, older, one he does not say aloud, and a flicker of an apartment with plants. It leaves as fast as it came. He has almost no money, and in the jeans pocket there is a bus card with a few dollars on it and nothing else. It does not feel like poverty. It feels like a body that spends itself on something.

The bus is two minutes off. The rain keeps coming. You lift your hands in front of you: broad, callused, the knuckles wind-reddened, the nails cut short. You turn them over. Then you look up, past the people under the shelter, into the wet gray, and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last." You do not know if it is him you are asking, or the wheel, or the next hunger, already stirring somewhere under his ribs.