Rafael Ochoa

You were Anil Deshmukh for less than a minute, and you are still standing in his kitchen in small-town Ohio, in the dark before the day, with his lazy eye catching the light on the microwave clock. The coffee has not even finished. Nothing is wrong with him. He is strong, his shoulders know what a wrench weighs, and his quiet is tidy. But you stood at the window looking at a flat field of frost and thought of the wheel the way a man thinks of a bottle in the next room. Nobody forced it. You wanted to be taken somewhere with weather. You pay. You spin. Anil's hands go still on the counter, and the wheel gives you a bus shelter.

The rain arrives first, a hard cold weight on a hood you are already wearing. Then the glass roof, the lit board that says 3 MIN, the bag straps biting your shoulders. You step out beyond the shelter's edge a beat early, shove the hood back, and lift your face into the runoff. You do not turn out of it. It runs into the moustache and off the chin, and you stand there like a man who has not been cold in a long time.

Your hand goes up to your face on its own, and the wet jacket sleeve opens the first thing. It is an hour ago, a hallway, and these same fingers pulling the zipper up past the hoodie while a girl's voice says *Papi, your hood*, and a second, smaller one laughs. They are his two. You feel the love like a stair that is not there, a drop in the chest, and you do not know their names yet.

The jeans, heavy and soaked at the knee, give you a different year. A night class, a plastic chair, and the shame and pride together of being forty-six among kids with laptops, writing the first paper of his life that his own mouth would have been too slow to say. Then the backpack strap, worn smooth, brings the library, a vending machine, a B-plus he told no one about except a woman on the phone, the old girlfriend, who said *good* in a way that undid him.

Under your soles the Converse are thin, and the water has found the seam. They hold the long walk home from a bar on a night he promised himself he would stop. His liver sits heavy under the ribs like a wet towel. There is a thirst in the body that has nothing to do with rain, and you recognize it, because you have your own.

The dimples are the last thing you feel, deep in both cheeks, pulled up by a smile you did not decide to make. He was glad to be out in this. He was a man going somewhere on purpose.

You bring your hand down out of the rain and turn it over. It is broad and callused, and it holds the water in its creases. You lift your eyes and say, to the street, "Okay. Okay, you."

The bus is coming, a smear of lights at the end of the block. Somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is quiet, for now, and you do not know how long that lasts.