Miguel Otero

You are Liam Sowards, and you have been Liam Sowards for four minutes, and already you know you are not staying.

It's the leg. Sitting in the recliner in a stranger's trailer, this skinny knee won't stop jackhammering against the coffee table, and it isn't nerves, it's just how this body idles, and you didn't ask for that and you don't want to learn to like it. The freckled hands are wrong in a way you can't name yet — too light, too young, not enough weather on them. Twenty-three years old and a whole life driving a bus in the dark and you can feel already that there's nothing in here worth the four minutes you already gave it. Boredom, if you're honest, though you wouldn't say the word out loud even to yourself. The phone is already open to the site. The wheel is already spinning under your thumb before you've decided anything, which is its own kind of decision.

It lands.

The road is dark and then it isn't yours to watch — you are behind it, hands at ten and two, dash light green on knuckles that are not the hands you just had. The car drifts a foot toward the centerline and comes back in one pull, smooth, like it was always going to. Both hands come off the wheel and land again lower, wider, the way a body sets itself without being told. The turn signal clicks on, blinking for an exit that means nothing to you and everything, somewhere below thought, to whoever owns these arms.

The shirt is what opens first. Short sleeve, work cotton gone soft with washing, a name patch under your fingers when you glance down — MIGUEL — and stains worked so deep into the fabric they'll never come out, and with it: a bay door going up on a gray morning, the smell of it, brake cleaner and old coffee, a Ford up on the lift and a kid — his kid, one of three, maybe more, he loses count on purpose because counting them makes his chest do something he doesn't have time for at 7 a.m. — asking if he can hand him a socket wrench. The rag in the back pocket, worn thin, right where his hand goes without looking, a thousand times, ten thousand.

The tattoo comes next, up under the sleeve where you can't see it but can feel the skin remembering: script, a name, a date. Carmen. 1999. Her voice arriving with it, younger than he ever knew her, in a church basement with folding chairs, the year everything after this got measured from. The vitiligo under your fingers when your own hand brushes your forearm — pale continents spreading slow over years, the dermatologist's office, Carmen's hand flat against his cheek one night saying it doesn't change one thing about your face, mijo, and him not believing her and coming to, eventually, mostly.

The wheel under your palms gives you the last three miles a hundred times over — this same stretch, streetlights thinning to none, the stoplight in town blinking yellow this late, the diner boarded since spring. Sunday. Church in the morning, all of them crammed in one pew, then the shop, a favor for a neighbor's transmission that ran long into evening because he doesn't know how to say no to a car that's somebody's only way to work. Girlfriend's voice on the radio dial he never touched, a station she likes, still set from Friday.

Your pocket, when your hip shifts against the seat, gives you the glucose meter, the case worn shiny at the corners, the four fingers of his left hand pricked so many times there's no good spot left, the particular tiredness of a low sugar coming on toward the end of a long day, the orange juice box he should've grabbed from the shop fridge and didn't.

Your feet on the pedals know this exactly, the give of the clutch, the particular sound this old engine makes when it wants a tune-up he keeps meaning to give it and never does, mechanic's shoes never fixed at home.

You look down at your hands on the lower part of the wheel. Pale patches climbing the left one like a map of somewhere. A stranger's hands, and none of the boredom you walked in with.

"Whose exit is that," you say, out loud, to no one, watching the blinker tick in the dark, already wondering how far three miles is, and how long is long enough before the wheel calls you back.