Suresh Bhatia

Rene Casillas has been you for less than a minute, and already you know the whole shape of him from the inside: the beard that itches at the jaw, the lanyard weight against his chest, the front desk chair with the wheel worn smooth on the left armrest, the phone that rang eleven times before lunch on a Thursday that hasn't happened yet. It is not dislike, exactly. It is the particular boredom of a body that is going to sit there being looked at all day, saying the same four sentences to people who don't look back. You gave him less than a minute because a minute was enough. You are already reaching for the site with his hand.

The wheel does not care how long you waited. It spins the way it always spins, and it puts you down mid-stride on a sidewalk with a hedge on your left and warm concrete under boots you don't own yet, your fist closing on a leash handle already wound twice too tight, a dog three feet ahead of you learning, in real time, that the pace of the walk has changed. The sun is high — mid-morning here too, though the man whose feet these are should by every reasonable clock still be asleep, and some tenant of a thought that isn't quite yours notes it and lets it go, because it is his morning to have lost, not yours to explain.

The shirt gives you the first of it: olive, long-sleeved, snug at a belly that pushes gently at the hem, and the sleeve against your forearm remembers pulling it on in a bathroom with the fan clattering and a woman's voice through the door asking if he'd fed the dog yet — Priya, half-dressed, hair still wet, laughing at something on her phone, not looking up. Suresh. The name arrives with the shirt, easy as a label, and behind it a whole morning: he stood at the mirror not really seeing himself, freckles he stopped noticing at nineteen scattered under eyes still soft with sleep, and he'd tugged the collar straight out of habit though no one at the dog park has ever once cared how his collar sat.

The leash handle gives more — years of it, actually, this exact retractable spool, the small satisfaction of the click when it locks, walking this same three-block loop before work because Bruno needs it and because it's the only twenty minutes of his day nobody emails him during. There's a glass-walled office waiting for him at eleven, a door he leaves open on purpose because closed doors make people nervous and he remembers what it felt like being the one outside them. He is not important there. He is competent there, liked there, tired there in a specific low-grade way that has nothing to do with anger.

The belt at his waist, cinched one notch tighter than it used to be, gives him a doctor's appointment eight months back and the flat, undramatic decision to walk more, which is partly why this loop exists and partly a lie he tells himself about willpower. The boots — scuffed, broken in exactly to the shape of feet that pronate slightly on the left — give a Sunday spent resealing a leak on the balcony while Priya handed him tools and told him he was doing it wrong, both of them laughing, ocean haze softening the whole skyline behind her.

The cartilage piercing at the top of his ear, cool under fingers that aren't thinking about it, gives you one sharp adolescent memory — a dare, a shop in a mall, his mother's face when she saw it — folded instantly under twenty more years of not caring either way.

His body under all of it: thirty-seven, solid through the shoulders and soft through the middle in the particular way of a man who used to play something and now mostly doesn't, a strength in the forearms that still knows how to lift and steady without asking permission, a right knee that clicks going down stairs, and beneath your ribs — his ribs — a leg already going, foot tapping against the pavement in a rhythm that started before you arrived and doesn't know how to stop just because someone new is driving.

You look down. Freckled knuckles, a stranger's wedding-adjacent tan line where no ring sits yet, dog hair caught in the cuff. You turn the hand over like it might tell you something the shirt didn't.

Bruno looks up at you, ears back, waiting to see if the walk is still the same walk.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, "who wants breakfast."