Ramón Aguilar Teller

You are standing in a kitchen in Miami with a glass of water you haven't drunk, in a lawyer's body that is less than a minute old. His gap-toothed reflection looks back at you from the dark window. The house is asleep. His refrigerator hums. You have been him for the length of one long breath, and you already know what is wrong.

He is too easy to be. Nothing in him pushes back. You tried the name in your mouth, Martin, and it sat there like a coin. You wanted to be taken somewhere, and he is only a man who is home. So you open the page on his phone, the wheel with its small gold teeth, and you pay with his card. You do not feel bad about the card. You press it.

The sidewalk arrives under you before anything else does. Cool concrete, a sodium-orange light, the smell of cut hedge and wet dirt. A leash handle is in your right hand, a hard plastic grip worn smooth, and the cord runs out to a small wiry dog with its nose in the leaves. You were not walking. You were waiting. Your weight is on your heels, and your belly sits forward over your belt, warm and solid. Your knees register the hour.

The dog lifts his head and looks at you past the hedge. His ears go flat. He knows. You wind the cord twice around your hand and step off, and he has to hurry to learn you.

The jacket comes first. Its collar is stiff against your neck, its cuffs frayed, and a zipper tab bites your thumb. Memory comes up through the cloth: a closet in a house with too many rooms, a hand taking this old jacket instead of the good one. He wore it to be nobody. Behind it sits a long table with the blinds half down and a bound report open under a lamp. He is reading numbers that other men are afraid of. Under that, a quieter feeling, shame at being so careful for so many years.

The shirt is thin cotton, soft from washing, and it clings to the sweat at your spine. You are given a morning in pieces. His left hand buttoning a cuff, then a right hand that stops. The bare pale band on the ring finger catches the lamp, and he rubs it with his thumb, an old habit, as if the ring might return if he checked. A woman's voice comes with a taste of coffee gone cold. His daughter's laugh follows, and a son's silence after it, heavier. He prays in a car outside a church before going in, because walking in cold feels like lying.

The jeans are stiff at the thigh and soft at the knee. The shoes are soles of foam, built for a man whose feet have started to complain. Your left heel aches, and your lower back says its small old sentence. Under all that, the body has strength: calves that hold, lungs that fill, a stride that finds its rhythm once you stop thinking.

The leash handle gives you the dog. A puppy in a carrier on a kitchen floor, and a divorce in the next room, and a man crying quietly into rough fur so no one hears. Nobody knows that about him. He has money and stopped drinking and keeps the lights low. He is lonely in a way that has never been spent.

You lift your hand into the streetlight. It is broad and thick-knuckled, and the pale stripe on the finger is real. You turn it over.

You look up, and you say out loud, to the dark houses, "All right. Let's see."

The dog stops. You don't know how long this one lasts. You think of the wheel, and its teeth are already turning somewhere behind your eyes.