Ray Quintana

The wire in my wrist, the one the electrician's body kept humming at, is why I'm leaving him. Not the beard or the good shoulders. Tonight, with the house asleep around us, I stood in his kitchen with a breaker panel open and a flashlight in my teeth, and every part of him knew exactly what to do. He didn't need me. His hands traced the dead line before I'd decided to. I was a passenger in a competence I hadn't earned, and I wanted to be the one who didn't know and had to learn it with my own want. So the phone is lit. The wheel turns. I let him go, a man I had for less than a minute, still warm.

Arrival. A lamp, low and yellow. Carpet under sock feet, thick and a little damp-cold. My hand is already at my chest, flat, and under the palm are ribs, closer to the skin than the belly would suggest, a soft middle over a narrow frame. The shirt is buttoned one off. I feel the crooked hem tug. A tie hangs loose on either side of my neck, cool silk against my throat. The window is black. Somewhere beyond it, music thumps through brick, and neon leaks pink along the glass.

My fingers move without asking. The buttons open, then close, each into its right hole, and then the tie is in my hands, and they build a knot I'd never have chosen, a tight, narrow thing, folded twice.

The cotton at my wrist gives me the first one. A Sunday morning, years back, he stood here in the same light, and an old man's voice in his head said, Fix your collar, mijo. His father's voice. His own fingers, brown with pale islands, learned this knot from that man, standing behind him at a mirror, reaching around. Pale patches, too, on the father's hands. Then the shirt's cuff, rough where it's been washed too often, and I get the wedding of a cousin, a table at the back, whiskey carried out to a parking lot, and shame that tasted like pennies. Heavy drinking has a taste I know now: a dry mouth, a tremor held down with effort. He keeps a bottle in the nightstand. The knowing sits in the throat.

The carpet gives me the church. Pews emptying, hands shaken at the door, a woman saying his sermon helped. He felt like a fraud and a shepherd at once. The waistband gives me a man named Daniel, an old boyfriend, a kitchen in a different year, laughter, a door closing softly, never mentioned from any pulpit. The ache of it lives under the sternum, under my palm. My knees hurt. My back is stiff. The moustache is dry on my lip, and I want a cigarette that he quit eleven years ago.

I lift my hands into the lamp. Pale patches map them like countries. I turn them over. Then I look up, into whatever is looking back.

"Well, Pastor," I say, and his voice is low and rough. "Let's see what you've got."

How long do you last? The wanting is already stirring, a small cold thing, and I do not know when it will rise.