Osvaldo Benítez

You are Hector Villanueva, and your knees are fine, and that is the problem. Fifty years old, five-eight, a body you have run up and down the stairwells of a gym on a Tuesday, shaved head cool under your palm, stubble, hazel eyes in the mirror of a client's bathroom. You have been him for less than a minute. A woman asked you to count her reps and you counted, and the number came out of your mouth in his voice, and it was a good voice, and nothing in you moved. That's what sent you back. You could do everything he could do. You wanted nothing he wanted. The page is open before you've decided. The wheel turns.

Then the fork is in your hand, halfway to your mouth.

Daylight from a tall window, hard and white. Your coat is still on, zipped to the sternum, and you are standing bent a little over a counter, the left hand flat on the laminate. Rice and something fried in a plastic container, the smell of onion and cumin and the oil gone cool. Gravity is different. You are shorter, lower to the floor, heavier through the middle, and the breath comes in under a belly that pushes back.

The fork's handle is thin metal, warm from his grip. Memory comes up through it: a Sunday, a long table, a daughter's boyfriend being quiet in a chair that was too small, and this man holding a fork exactly so, pointing it at nobody, saying *eat, eat, you're skin*. The pride in it is large and soft and has nothing to do with you.

The jacket rustles at your ribs. Navy, nylon, the cuffs ribbed and tight at the wrists. It gives you the morning: the closet door that sticks, his wife's voice from the other room asking if he took the pill, the zipper started three times because his fingers are thick and he is patient with them. Under it the plaid shirt, soft with washing, the collar he turns flat with two fingers every time and does not know he does.

Your left thumb finds the ring. Plain gold, worn thin on the inside. A flash: a church that smelled of wax, a hot afternoon, a girl's hand shaking inside his, and him whispering something to make it stop. You almost have the words. You don't.

Your right thumbnail goes to your teeth. You didn't send it. The edge is already bitten to the quick, and your tongue knows the ragged place. Behind that, a craving with a ghost shape, a cigarette lit on a fire escape twenty years back, quit for a daughter's lungs, and a different thirst, older, that he let go of one winter and never says aloud.

Your feet ache in the brown shoes, a dull arch ache, the knee complaining at the bend. His back has opinions. His stomach is full and wants the rest anyway. There's a little money put away, you feel it as a calm in his chest, a number he checks and doesn't tell.

You lower the fork. It touches the counter with a small tick.

You turn your hand over under the window light, the knuckles broad, the nails chewed, the ring. Then you look up at the dark glass of your own reflection, the gray moustache, the single heavy brow drawn together.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and rough and kind. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."