Rogelio Casillas

You are Gerald Vance Krupinski for the 452nd-to-last time, and it is Friday, and it is the kind of afternoon that makes you hate a man you have only worn three days. His feet hurt in his own boots. His radio crackles about a shakedown on Block C that isn't your problem for another forty minutes. You have his beauty mark, his bald head under the ballcap, his dad's gut riding over his belt, and you have his headache, which is really your headache now, throbbing behind eyes that are not the eyes you were born looking out of, whenever that was, wherever that was, so long ago you no longer bother reaching for it. Gerald is fine. Gerald is nothing. Gerald clocks in and clocks out and eats the same ham sandwich every day standing at a chain-link fence, and three days of that is three days too many. You go to the break room, you take out the phone, which is also his, and you open the page with the wheel on it, because boredom is its own kind of hunger and you have never once told it no.

The wheel spins. Somewhere far off and two hours earlier, a needle stops moving.

You are sitting down. That is the first thing — the weight of your own body dropped low and settled, not standing at attention the way Gerald stood at everything. There is a pull on your forearm, gentle, insistent, and pain arrives late and small, more heat than hurt. A machine is buzzing an inch from your skin. Green soap smells like a swimming pool that never got cleaned. Someone is holding your arm like it's a thing on a table, not a thing attached to a man, and for one strange, weightless second you let them, because you do not yet know that you're allowed to mind.

Then the shirt on your back tells you something. Not words — a Tuesday, three years gone, this same gray shirt pulled on over a shoulder that clicked when it went in the sleeve, the click you learned to expect and stopped flinching at. A whistle drops cold against your sternum on its cord and you remember, in his feeling, the weight of forty-one client-hours a week, the particular tired of spotting a bench press for a man twice your size while your own knees complain in a language only you understand. Your knees complain now. You notice them the way you'd notice weather.

The tattoo needle keeps going and it opens him wider — jeans worn soft at the knee from kneeling to spot dumbbells off the floor, and under that, a night eleven years back, sitting on a barstool with a woman who is not his wife anymore, laughing at something so hard his crooked nose ached, the nose that got broken by a bar in a Reno gym in his twenties and healed wrong and never bothered him since except in mirrors. Marisol's laugh. That's her name arriving with the memory, easy as a held door. You were married to her for six years and it ended without either of you being the villain, which somehow made it worse, a grief with nobody to blame. There's a daughter from before that, grown now, who calls on Sundays and calls you Papi in a voice gone flat and grown-up, and you love her so plainly it sits in your chest like a stone you're glad to carry.

The wedding band on your left hand is warm from your own skin — three years married to Carla, second time around, the ring a half-size big and always turning loose when your fingers swell in the heat. She kissed this same crooked nose this morning while you were putting on shorts you've owned since a Vegas heat wave nobody remembers the year of, hopping once on your left foot getting the right leg through, the elastic waist you're grateful for every single morning because bending at the hips still catches something low in your back that never fully healed from a car accident nobody warned you was coming. Your hands are shaking, a little, the way they always do when they're not doing anything in particular — steady enough on a barbell, steady enough on a dumbbell, useless and trembling the second they're empty, like right now, in your own lap.

The tattoo is a bird, unfinished, meant for your granddaughter, though you keep that reason to yourself even from Carla, embarrassed at your age to want something that soft inked into your arm. You told the artist a design and not the why.

You look at your hands. They are shaking exactly as they always do, which feels, absurdly, like relief — proof they're yours again. The needle has stopped; the artist is waiting, gloved hand hovering, face unreadable behind the ring light.

"Sorry," you say, in his voice, rough with a stranger's forty years of gravel. "Lost myself for a second there."