Mauricio Ibarra

Kyle's hands are wet to the wrist. That is the last thing he is, a dishwasher at the end of a double, the steam of the line still in his sinuses, the sprayer hose hanging in the dark kitchen. Nobody is awake. Atlanta is a black window over the pass. You have been him for less than a minute, and you are already tired of how well he works.

It isn't him. He did nothing wrong. His shoulders are good, his forearms are good, the cleft in his chin, the plate stacks that lift like nothing. But you came here from a place where a man's name was on a card and you stood in this kitchen and found you wanted to be someone nobody had ever asked to carry anything. Someone with a lamp on. Someone with an evening. You dry your hands on his apron and open the page with the wheel on it, and the spin is already ticking before you decide.

Then the ticking stops, and it is a couch.

You are sitting. There is a cracked fortune cookie in your left hand, the slip half-drawn between a thumb and finger, and the room is yellow with lamplight. Takeout cartons sit open on the coffee table, a cup of something amber, chopsticks laid across a napkin. Rain on the window. Your thighs are thin under denim. Your breath is easy and sour with smoke and orange chicken, and your jaw is clenched, you did not clench it, it was clenched already.

You pull the slip the rest of the way out. Paper, thin as a tongue. It gives you nothing. You read it once, then again slower, and your mouth keeps going a word past where the line ends, because a line that short has no business having more.

The hoodie comes first. Cotton gone soft and heavy with washing, the cuff cracked at the wrist. And there it is, his hands doing it: a gray morning, the drawer sticking, this one pulled out from under two others because the black ones are cleaner. He tugs it over his head and the neck catches on the cartilage ring in his ear, and he swears, and fixes it, and doesn't take it out. Girl's idea, once. He kept it after she was gone. The ache of that is small and permanent, like a tooth he won't see about.

The jeans. Stiff at the knee, loose at the hip, a belt notch punched by hand with a nail. He bought them on a day he'd cleared forty dollars, and he felt rich in them, walking down a hill in rain, a library book against his chest. Under the denim his legs are all string and tendon, a runner's calves with no running in them. He is hungry in a way dinner didn't touch. He is twenty-one and it is a year of cheap noodles in his knees.

The slip in your fingers. Something comes through paper: her laugh, at a table like this one, over a cookie like this one, reading the fortune in a stupid voice. An old ex, and the wish he made that night, which he never said aloud and which you now have whole, and which is not about her anymore. It is about the exam on Friday, and the money, and a mother's voice on the phone saying *mijo, no te preocupes*, which meant worry. You flinch. It isn't yours. It sits in your chest like a swallowed coin.

The sleeve. You push the hoodie cuff up and the cross is there on his forearm, the praying hands under it, ink he got in a back room with his cousin watching. Spiritual, not religious: he believes in something that listens, and does not believe in the building. The skin there remembers the needle as heat, a bee-line, then a numb shine.

Your thumb finds the pack in the pocket, soft, nearly empty. The craving arrives all at once in his lungs. It is a pack a day, and it knows exactly what time it is.

You lift your right hand and turn it over. Palm, lines, the cross running up the wrist to the elbow. His. Yours. Thin, quick, warm. You lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected. "Okay, Mauricio."

It is the lamp, the rain, a stranger's pulse in your throat. Somewhere a wheel is already waiting, patient as a clock, and you do not know whether he lasts the night.