Rodrigo Valdivia

You are standing in a kitchen in Maine with the refrigerator light on your bare feet, and Julian Barrientos's broken nose is itching, the way it does when the weather turns. You have been him for under a minute. The hum of the refrigerator is a good sound. The house above you is asleep: a child's fan, a woman's slow breath through a wall. All of it is yours to keep, and none of it is what you want.

What sent you back is small. You opened the drawer by the stove, found his wife's handwriting on a list, and understood you could do the list perfectly. You would be good at this life. That is the trouble. Nothing in it can surprise you, because he has been so carefully arranged. You close the drawer with his scarred knuckle and the page is still open on the screen, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the kitchen is gone with no seam. You are lying face-down in a stranger's bed, one arm hanging, his breath ragged in your chest and then even in one pull. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains. Your arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at the sternum like a man laid out. He has never once slept like this. You can feel that, in the stiffness of the elbows: the body is surprised at its own obedience.

The first thing you touch is the sheet, and it hands you a woman's laugh in another bedroom, years back, and the weight of three small children piled on the mattress on a Sunday. Then the shirt, a soft black tee worn thin at the collar, and it gives you the morning he bought it, because it was the only thing in the store that fit over the belly he had stopped being ashamed of. His hands remember pulling it on in the dark. They remember the khakis too, the left leg first, the belt gone soft at the fourth hole. In the memory he is fastening a ring of keys to a clip, and each key has a name in his head: 4B, the laundry room, the pool gate he never fixed.

You press your thumb into the base of your ring finger and find the pale place where the band used to sit. It carries a long grief that has gone quiet. It is not for the wife. It is for the other man, the one who got away, and for a creek and a cable bridge, brown water under green shade, where he used to stand and not say it. The jaw clenches by itself. Your teeth ache with the habit. His body wants a cigarette it quit years ago, and it wants it in the roof of the mouth.

The mattress is firm under a lower back that has opinions. The knees are stiff. The belly rises and falls under your folded hands. The money he has, nobody here would guess, and neither would the tenants. It sits in him as a quiet floor.

Then you unfold your hands in the dark and lift one. You turn it over. The palm is broad, the knuckles thick, a pale stripe on the finger where a ring used to be.

You look up at the ceiling, and past it, and say, quietly, "Okay, Rodrigo. Show me."

Nothing answers. You do not know whether you will still be here when the light changes.