Rubén Zamarripa

You are standing in front of a ring light in a bedroom that isn't yours, in a body that was never yours either, and the follower count on the monitor keeps climbing and it does nothing for you. Two minutes ago you became this man — bald, brown-eyed, 5'8", a build you didn't earn — and already the shine of it has gone flat, the way it always does now, faster every time. Somebody in the chat is typing hearts. You feel the jaw of this body clench once, on its own, an old habit belonging to someone else's nerves, and that's the thing that decides you: even his tics aren't yours. You open the site on the phone in his hand. The wheel is already spinning before you've finished deciding, the way it always is.

Rain, first. Cold in a way that has weight to it, and gray light through fogged glass, and a hood pushed back off wet hair. You're mid-step, one boot already down in the runoff, water finding a seam of scalp and running warm-then-cool along a jaw that is already clenched, has maybe been clenched for an hour. Above you, unseen but felt, a board ticking down. You tip your face up into it instead of away, and something in the body wants this, wants the water on it, and you let the wanting carry you a second before you notice it isn't yours yet.

Then it is.

The hoodie is the first thing — worn soft at the cuffs, a zipper pull gone smooth from a thumb rubbing it thoughtless for years — and it opens like a door: mornings, dozens of them, this same jacket off a nail by the kitchen door, the smell of coffee and bar oil already on it before he's touched a saw. Rubén Zamarripa. The name arrives with the jacket, the way his own name always does, unasked, correct. Forty-four years in Karnes County, give or take. The tattoos on his forearms — the black tribal bands — come up warm from inside, not from outside; he got the first one at nineteen with money he shouldn't have spent, the second for his daughter's name hidden under the linework so nobody has to ask and he never has to answer. Selena. Nine years old. Living with her mother two towns over, the ex-girlfriend who still calls him when the truck breaks down like they're still something, which they are, just not the thing either of them will say.

The boots against the wet concrete bring up a whole life of ground — cut blocks, the give of a stump under a boot when the chain's still hot, the particular ache that lives now in both knees and low across the back, permanent, the ache of a man who has been bending and lifting since he was seventeen. It doesn't go away. It rides under everything, dull, familiar, almost comforting the way an old dog is comforting. His hands know a saw's weight without thinking, know the drop of a trunk before it drops, the two-second lean that tells you which way it's going to go. Muscle holds the memory even when the man himself is elsewhere.

The flannel — the same one from a different morning, a red-black plaid gone soft, sawdust ground into the seams no washing gets out — brings back Marisol. Girlfriend, two years now, the smell of her kitchen, her laugh at something he said that wasn't even that funny, the specific gravity of falling for someone at forty-two when you thought that part of you had already closed up shop. Sunday Mass with her mother, sitting in the pew doing the responses from muscle memory same as the saw-lean, not believing so much as belonging. A big night out once a month or so, two beers turning into six, her hand flat on his chest telling him that's enough, and him listening, mostly.

The rain keeps coming down on you both — the body and whatever's left of the body's owner, which is nothing, which is a thing you don't let yourself sit with — and under the drumming of it you get the last of him: waiting on this bus because the truck's transmission finally quit for good, three days now walking or catching rides, and this is the way into town to see about a part he can't afford, and Selena has a thing at school Thursday he's already promised he'll make.

You look down at your hands. Water runs off them into the gutter at your boots. They are not your hands, they have never been your hands, and there is a jaw somewhere behind your face clenching on nothing at all, the way it always has, whether or not anyone's inside to feel it.

You lift your eyes to the rain, to nothing in particular, and you say, out loud, in his voice:

"Three minutes."