Samir Khoury

You are standing in a kitchen in Denver, in the dark, with the refrigerator humming and a body that has been yours for less than a minute. Mateo Arellano, eighteen, between jobs. His belly sits soft against the counter edge. His beard itches. You have a glass of water in his hand and nothing wrong with any of him.

Nothing is wrong, and that is the reason. He was a good body that did what it was told, and it felt like a coat somebody had left on a hook for you. You stood there and understood that you would be a good coat forever, and the wheel was already open on the phone in the other hand, glowing. You pay. You spin. You do not say goodbye to him, because you have never once found anyone to say it to.

Then a bathroom, and the toothbrush is already moving.

Mint, foam on the upper lip, the tap running cold and loud. The brushing stops mid-stroke because you stopped it. You start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because the left side was his habit and you want to know what the right feels like. Your weight is on the balls of bare feet. Tile is cold. The right leg is bouncing, you realize, a little hammer in the knee, going on without you. You rinse twice. You stand the brush bristles-up, out of the grey water it has always sat in, and the cup beside it is a different cup.

The sink edge is cool porcelain under your left palm, and it opens.

A summer, the bathroom new to him then, a landlord's paint still sticky on the trim, and Samir laughing because his two kids are fighting over who gets the top step of the stool to reach this same faucet. Their wet heads. Their toothpaste on his shirt. A feeling arrives that is not yours, which is the wish to freeze it, to keep it from ever turning into the morning.

The gray T-shirt is soft at the collar from a hundred washings, and the sleeve brings the morning he put the brown uniform shirt on instead. Left arm first, always. The pocket flap. The scanner clipped to the waistband with a click he feels in his sternum. A coffee that he drank standing, bouncing the leg, praying a short Hail Mary out of habit rather than hope, while the van idled out front in the autumn overcast.

The plaid pajama pants drag at the ankle, and she gave them to him. A girlfriend, a name that comes up sweet and then cautious, a woman who sleeps down the hall tonight and does not yet sleep in the same bed as his kids. Past her, the older ghost: a woman before, the mother of two, and a kitchen where nobody raised a voice and everything ended anyway. It still weighs. He sends money. He keeps his savings in a bank account he checks the way other men touch a rosary, fifty thousand or so, a wall he is building against everything.

The body: thirty-five, thin arms and soft middle, a lower back that aches from lifting boxes out of the open rear of a van forty times a day. Calluses at the base of the fingers. Knees that remember stairs. A lock of white hair at the front that you can feel when you tilt your head.

Then you lift your hands from the sink.

You turn them over. They are brown, square, knuckled, and they are not his anymore. They smell of mint and soap. The leg is still bouncing.

You look up into the mirror, into the strange brown eyes, and you say to him, low enough not to wake the house, "Hello, Samir."

The tap is still running. Somewhere you can already feel the wanting begin, a small hum under the ribs. You do not know if you will still be him by morning.