Rafael Almanza

You are still Samir Haddadin when you decide, and he has been yours for less than a minute. You stand in his kitchen in the Los Angeles dark, the tile cold under his bare feet, the refrigerator humming over the whole sleeping house. His shoulders are wide and strong, and they feel like a coat cut for a stranger. You opened the cabinet to find a glass and found his daughter's cup instead, with a chipped rabbit on it, and you held it and felt nothing at all. It was not his to give you. Nothing in this body is hungry the way you are, and that is the whole trouble. So you put the cup back, and you go.

The wheel turns under a light you can't see, and then the dark is a different dark.

It is small and close and smells of old bedding. You are on your side, and the screen is six inches from your face, blue on one cheek. The thumb is stopped mid-scroll. Then it starts again, faster and steadier than he ever moved it, flicking past everything he had stopped on. You are not holding the phone so much as you are inside the hand that holds it.

You are heavy, a compact man, short, built dense. There's a low hum in the lower back, the long ache of hours in a seat. The beard is thick against the pillow, and it itches at the jaw. Something pulls at the skin across your nose and cheeks when you breathe in, and you can't tell yet what it is.

The sheet under your palm is rough, washed too many times. A flash comes up through it: a laundromat at dawn, his wife folding it, her laughing because he had never learned to fold a fitted corner. It is warm and ordinary, and it is his.

The shirt is soft with age and clings to your ribs, and you remember it as he does. He pulled it from the cab bunk that evening, because the clean ones were back home in Detroit, and he smelled the collar first. You feel the small shame of that and the small habit under it.

Then the ring. Your thumb finds it and turns it, and the metal is warm. He bought it with the first check from a haul he nearly lost, and the night before the wedding his hands shook so badly he dropped it under a motel bed. His wife got down on the carpet with a flashlight. You feel that, the giddy fear of it.

The cuticle of the left thumb is raw, and you are already picking at it, a thing the hand does without being asked. You let it. Under the picking, a child's voice somewhere in him asks for one more story, and he is on the phone on a loading dock saying yes, yes, he'll call back at bedtime. Tonight he didn't. The phone is full of that failure, and the bed is a cab with the cold behind its curtains.

You stop the thumb. The screen goes dim and then dark, and you hold your own reflection there, a freckled stranger in a black beard. You turn the hand over, the ring catching the last light. Then you lift your eyes and look straight out.

"Okay," you say, low, in a voice that is not quite yours or his. "Let's see how long you last."