Ramón Iglesias

You are still Arjun. Five minutes wearing him and the wrist braces already ache from a shift that wasn't yours, the tray-weight ghost still living in the tendons, and across the empty restaurant floor Rodrigo is standing by the register in his butcher's apron with sawdust on his shoes, except Rodrigo isn't standing there — you were Rodrigo four spins ago, and this is only the leased echo of him, a photograph someone forgot to take down. You gave him back five minutes ago. He is still warm. You keep looking at the door like he's going to walk through it, which is insane, since you're the one who left. That's the something. That's why your thumb is already finding the little chrome wheel on your phone. Grief for a man you were, standing in a body that never met him, is a very specific kind of unbearable, and the only cure the site ever offers is *elsewhere*.

You spin.

The molars on the lower left are half-clean and the brush is between them, foam gone gritty with toothpaste, and you are older, heavier through the middle, standing at a sink you did not fill and did not choose. Tap running. Mirror fogged at the corners with a day's humidity. You finish the stroke you didn't start — good, thorough, muscle doing what muscle does — and move to the other side, slower now, working the back teeth like there's no hurry in the world, because there isn't, not for him, not ever, and that itself is information: this is a man for whom the end of a day is a small ceremony and not a surrender.

The mirror gives you a mole, high on the left cheek, dark as a period at the end of a sentence. Bald head catching the last window-light. Brown eyes that have seen forty years of other men's worst days from a folding chair below a judge's bench.

You rinse. Twice, out of habit that isn't yours yet but is already installing itself. You stand the brush bristles-up in the cup, out of the grey water, and the cup itself unlocks him — Ramón Iglesias, and here he comes, all at once, the way a held door lets in weather.

The T-shirt against your back: a Cuyahoga Valley 10K he never ran, wife's brother did, he wore the shirt to be kind. Comfortable through the shoulders in a way that comes from thirty years of the same three-button vest hanging off them five days a week, county courthouse, second floor, the little chorded stenotype riding between his knees like something he's been playing since 1988. His fingers still know the strokes without asking — *witness*, *objection*, *sustained* — a language nobody else in the room can read, tapped out under a judge's bench while daylight moves across tall windows and men's lives get decided in testimony he's never allowed an opinion on. He loves that job in a way he's never said out loud to anyone but Marisol, loves being the one thing in the courtroom that has to get every word exactly right.

The ring: forty years married to a woman named for a hymn her mother liked. Three kids, maybe four depending how you count the one who moved to Columbus and stopped calling as much. A house with a mortgage paid off eleven years ago. Money enough that he never talks about it — insurance premiums from thirty years of malpractice-adjacent work, careful investing, an inheritance from an uncle in Toledo — money that sits there and does nothing but let him sleep, except lately the sleeping isn't so good, because of Dr. Okonkwo and the word *arrhythmia* and the little orange bottle he takes with breakfast now.

The tap water on his hands: cold, and it brings back the ex — Carla, thirty-eight years gone, a girl from Youngstown who left before Marisol, before any of it, and who he thinks about maybe once a month, guiltlessly, the way you think about weather in a city you used to live in. He has never told his wife how often. It is the one door in the house of him that stays shut.

The floor under his bare feet: cracked tile, warm from the pipe underneath, and it gives you thirty-nine years of this exact bathroom, this exact hour, brushing his teeth at the end of every working day of his life while somewhere below him a courthouse empties out and somewhere upstairs Marisol is turning down a bed. He never drinks, never smoked, prays before dinner and means it, and his hands, when he's not thinking about them, click a pen that isn't even in them right now — the ghost-click still there anyway, a tic thirty years deep, wanting a pen.

His heart, under all of it, ticks with something a cardiologist has a name for. You can feel it now that you're looking — a faint syncopation, a held breath his body takes every so often that he's stopped noticing.

You look at your hands. Wet, older than any hands you've worn in months, a wedding band catching the bathroom light.

You look up into the fogged mirror and say, to no one, in his voice, "Same face as this morning."