Owen Margolis

You are standing in Gilbert Navarrete's kitchen in El Paso, and the linoleum is cold through his socks. His knees ache from twenty years under other people's trucks. His thumbnail is black from a bad day with a jack, and the grease never leaves the creases of his knuckles. You have worn him for less than a minute. He is already finished. He was a good body, and he could do everything but the thing you wanted, which was to be somewhere the wanting stopped. The laptop glows on the counter with the wheel on it. His beard is gray and prickly under your palm. You press the key.

Then you are lying down, and it's a different dark.

Your face is pressed into a pillow that smells of someone else's shampoo. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it; the fingers tingle with a pins-and-needles hum. Your breath was ragged, and one breath later it is even. Your body rolls over by itself. It is lighter than Gilbert's, long and loose, with nothing aching. You fold your hands on your chest the way you would lie in a coffin, which this body has never once done in sleep. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your ribs.

Everything is touch. The gray T-shirt is worn thin and soft against your stomach, and the collar is stretched. Your fingers find the hem, and a morning arrives that is not yours. He pulls it from the floor, sniffs it, decides it is fine. He is late, and there is a girl's text unanswered on the nightstand, and he tugs the sleeve over a forearm that is lean and quick. His feeling is a low, ashamed ache about her name. Then it is gone.

Under the shirt, at the collar, your thumb finds a fine ridge of ink. A triangle, drawn with lines like hair. A flash: a chair, a buzzing needle, his sister's friend who did it cheap, and him pretending it did not hurt. Eighteen. Proud. He has not told his church-going mother about it, and he wears hoodies to Sunday service so it stays hidden. Her hands are on his shoulders in a parking lot, and he feels his own tenderness for her and his fear.

Your tongue finds a small stud when you press your ear, cold metal in each lobe. A bass line, a basement, a Friday. Beer, a big night, the one or two a month he allows himself, and the next morning's guilt with the prayer in it, mumbled to the ceiling.

The sheets are twisted around your calves, the jeans stiff on your legs, because he fell asleep dressed. You feel the denim seam press into your hip. Another memory: a library, a laptop on a campus lawn in thin sun, a paper due, rent due, forty dollars in the account, and a bowl of dry cereal. He is scraping by, and he is not unhappy about it. He is twenty-one and the future feels like a door he has not tried.

Your cheek has a small heat where a mole sits high up. She used to kiss it. Her name comes up whole now: the ex, the recent one. Her laugh on a stairwell. A fight about nothing. The unsent text. It hurts exactly where his sternum is, under your folded hands, and you let it hurt, because you have never been loved by anyone in your life, not in any body, and here is a stranger's grief like a coin in a pocket.

Then your hands. You lift them in the streetlight, long fingers, clean nails, a callus on the side of the right middle finger from pens. You turn them over. They are warm and they are yours for now.

You look up at the dark ceiling, and you say, softly, in a voice that is higher than you expected, "Okay. Okay, Owen."

The room says nothing. The street breathes. You wonder how long the wanting takes to come back this time, and whether you will wake as him.