Reinaldo Esquivel

You are standing in Xavier Montoya's kitchen in Denver with the cold coming off the window, and you have been deciding for an hour. The body is fine. It is better than fine: five-four and dense, shoulders that carry a grocery bag like it owes them money. Today a woman at the office, the one with the lanyard, looked straight at the top of your head while she talked to you, and you felt the whole short length of him from the inside, the way you feel a step that isn't there. That was all. Nobody said anything. You ate a yogurt standing up. He has a good refrigerator and a bad couch, and the couch has your spine now. One day and eight hours, and the wanting has come back like a tooth. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you pay.

Then the tile is under your slippers and the tap is running.

Mint in your mouth, foam on your lip, a brush moving in your fist mid-stroke. You stop. You start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because the front is done and the back is where the care is. Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. It bounces against the cabinet door, a small steady knock.

The shirt is soft with washing, and it gives you the first thing: a drawer, a dim bedroom, his thumb hooking the neck of this same black shirt over his head because she used to say it was the only one that didn't scratch. Her side of the bed is still made. He makes it. Your chest tightens with a feeling that is entirely his.

The sweatpants, loose at the waist, give you a belly that sits forward and soft, thin arms, a body that was never trained and has stopped apologizing. Your knees ache going down into the sink's edge. The porcelain is cold under your palm, and it hands you a Sunday, three grown children crowded in a hallway this size, all of them arguing over who gets the mirror, a daughter's elbow in his ribs, his laughter so loud it makes the gap in your front teeth whistle. You run your tongue across it now. A door in the mouth. He hated it once, and then a woman kissed it, and he stopped.

The ring is on your left hand, loose over the knuckle. When you turn it, a church comes up, wet heat in the air outside, candles, the priest's slow vowels, and his knee on the kneeler, the knee that hurts now. Cigarettes come up behind that, twenty years of them, and quitting on the porch in a hard week, a coffee going cold on the rail while he did not light one. You can still feel the missing weight in two fingers.

You rinse twice. The water is grey where the brush has always sat. You stand it bristles-up, out of the grey, and something in him flinches at that, a habit broken, but he is not there to mind.

You look at your hands. They are brown and square, veins raised, the ring catching the bulb. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes to the mirror, to the lens of it, to whoever is watching, and you say, low, "Ándale, then. Let's see how long."

The leg keeps bouncing. You don't know if you are him tomorrow.