Rolando Zamora

The wrench is still warm from Kevin's hand when the boredom finds you.

You're standing in a garage that smells like brake dust and cold coffee, at three in the morning, a Friday nobody in this city is awake for. Kevin Auyeung is twenty-four and his shoulder doesn't ache and his knees don't complain and none of it matters, because seven minutes ago you were somebody else too, and seven minutes before that somebody else, and the pattern underneath all of it is the same: you get a body, you stand in it for a while, and then the wanting comes back like a itch behind a face you don't own. Kevin's phone is on the workbench, dead screen, a lock wallpaper of a woman you don't recognize and don't care to. You didn't come here for him. You came here already restless in the last one, whoever that was, and Kevin was just what the wheel gave you to be restless in next.

You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, because his thumbprint still works even though nothing else in him is his anymore. The wheel loads slow on his cracked screen. You spin.

—

The scroll under your thumb goes fast and sure, cutting through a stopped feed like you've been doing it for years, and the light off the phone lands on a jaw that has never in its life needed a shave this late and gotten one anyway. You're on your side in the dark. A mattress, no headboard, the smell of fabric softener and something antiseptic underneath it, permanent, the smell of a job worn home. The room is a stranger's dark, blinds letting in a strip of parking-lot orange. Somewhere close, a window unit rattles.

The body under you is compact, tired in the specific way of a man who's been on his feet twelve hours, calves faintly sore, lower back a low steady complaint you recognize the shape of before you know its name. Forty-five and still fast to move, thumb flicking, breath even. Nothing hurts sharply. Everything hurts a little, all the time, in the reasonable way of a body that works for a living and works hard.

—

The shirt is what opens first — not the one he's wearing now, the gray sleep shirt is too new to hold anything — but your own weight settling into the mattress calls up the ghost of the other shirt, the maroon one, cotton gone soft at the collar from a hundred washes, and with it comes a whole morning: him standing in front of a mirror at 5:40 a.m., pulling the scrub top over his head in one motion his arms know without asking, tucking the little brass pocket watch into the breast pocket because the ward clocks are always ten minutes off and he doesn't trust them, looping the bag strap over one shoulder, checking his jaw in the mirror out of habit though he shaved it clean the night before and there's nothing there to check. Rolando Zamora, straightening a collar that doesn't need straightening.

The mattress under you gives up the shape of other nights — Marisol's side of the bed, gone eleven years now, the dip in the cushion he still avoids without deciding to. The divorce came quiet, the way most true griefs do, no single wound to point at, just two people who ran out of things to withhold and found nothing underneath. He touches his ring finger sometimes without noticing, the pale strip of skin there like a scar that never broke the surface. His daughter is twenty, in college two hours away, calls on Sundays. He keeps the ringtone different for her. That's the whole of what he lets himself want, some nights — that ringtone, going off.

His hands know things without him: how to lift a woman twice his weight off a bedpan without straining either of their backs, how to talk in the low unhurried voice that gets a frightened man with dementia to unclench his fist, how to change a bed with someone still in it. The corridor smell is in his knuckles even now, off shift, showered — bleach and old paper and the particular staleness of rooms that don't get real air. He likes the work more than he'd say out loud in a bar. He goes to Mass some Sundays, not all. He drinks maybe four times a year, at weddings, at his sister's, never alone. His face, when he's not paying attention to it, ends up under his own palm — checking the shave that's always already done, an old tic from a father who used to grab his chin and say *look at me when I talk*.

The phone is still six inches from a face that has stopped blinking on schedule.

—

You bring the thumb to a stop and turn the hand over, palm up, in the blue light. Not Kevin's hand. Not the hand from before that, or the one before that, nine hundred and twenty-some hands back down a line you've stopped counting honestly. This one has a groove in it already, a fine white absence where a ring used to sit, and you press your thumb into it like checking a bruise that isn't there.

"Okay," you say, to the empty room, in his voice, low, a little rough from disuse. "Okay."

You don't know yet how long the itch stays quiet in this one. You never do.