Terrence Kalama

Rafael Contreras has been you for less than a minute, and already the hand you're using to hold the mouse is an old man's hand, spotted, the wedding band long gone from it, knuckles swollen with something that will only get worse. The office smells like his life: chalk dust that hasn't touched a board in a decade, a mug of coffee gone cold at his elbow, a shelf of books with his own name on three of their spines. There is a framed photo of a wife who left him in year two of teaching and a lecture he was supposed to grade a semester ago. None of it is yours. You spun into him seven days back — you remember spinning into him, the way you remember all 753 before, distant as other people's vacations — and within that first minute you already knew: nothing here moves. A man at the end of a life, tenure long secured, body already keeping its own private inventory of failures. Interesting for four days. Then a chore. You did not choose this one for its ceilings and its ceilings are all you've found. The cursor sits on the wheel's blue spin button like it's been waiting on you the whole time you were pretending to think it over.

You press it before you finish the thought that it's still morning here, that a decent man would eat breakfast first.

The breath goes from ragged to even in a single pull — his breath, not yours yet, but you're already inside it, already the one drawing it — and the arm hanging off the mattress lifts itself, folds up onto a chest that is not Rafael's sunken chest but something broader, still young in the ways that matter, and settles there with the other hand over it, a stranger's hands crossed like a man laid out for viewing. Streetlight is coming through a gap in the curtain, thin as a knife, and under you the sheets are damp with someone else's night sweat, and there is a smell of red dirt and salt that has never once been in that office in New Orleans.

The shirt is what opens first — a plain navy tee, worn thin at the collar, and the second your borrowed shoulders settle into it you get him: Terrence, size and shape of him, thirty-one years in this frame, a body that has spent a decade throwing forty-pound boxes eight hours at a stretch and has the low ache in the lower back to prove it, the kind that never quite leaves, that he stretches out every morning against the doorframe before his feet even hit the floor. His hands know things before you do — the exact grip width of a pallet jack handle, the give of a box that's about to fail versus one that'll hold, the two-finger flick that checks a strap's tension without thinking. Calluses along both palms, a permanent yellow half-moon of a bruise healing on the left thumb from a container door two weeks back. The wedding band is thin gold, a little loose now that he's dropped weight this year running the floor short-staffed, and touching it with your own borrowed thumb gives you a wash of a wedding — folding chairs on a lawn, his mother crying into a handkerchief, a woman named Leilani in a dress the color of hibiscus, laughing at him for crying too.

The mattress against your back gives you the rest of the house before the memory even finishes forming — tin roof ticking as it cools at night and popping as it heats by seven a.m., red dust that gets into everything no matter how many times you sweep the steps, a yard with one skinny plumeria tree his daughter calls hers. Her name arrives soft and complete: Malia, five years old, who insists on saying goodnight to the tree before she'll go to bed. He works nights loading trailers at the airport freight terminal because the differential pays for her preschool, and that's why it's still dark outside this window at an hour when other men are already up — his day ends when the sun is still deciding whether to rise, and he comes home to sleep through the brightest, whitest part of the day with the curtains pulled and never quite managing to keep the glare all the way out.

There's a flash of last night's shift — a supervisor short-handed, a truck he loaded alone in under forty minutes, the small mean pride of doing a two-man job solo and clocking out at 5 a.m. with his back screaming and not caring. A flash of the bar two blocks from the terminal, one beer with Kimo before driving home, always one, sometimes two, never three, an old promise he made himself after his father's example did the opposite. A flash of church on Sunday, Leilani beside him in the pew holding Malia's hand so she doesn't wander, the pastor's voice rolling out over the ceiling fans, and Terrence not always sure he believes every word of it but sure enough of the feeling under it to keep coming back.

The morning he put this shirt on — this exact one, eighteen hours ago now by his clock — comes through last, thinnest of all because it's the most recent: pulling it over his head still half-asleep in reverse, getting ready not for a day but for a night, kissing Leilani's forehead where she lay already dozing with the baby monitor turned to Malia's room, saying *love you, back before she's up* the way he says it every single night before this shift, a small worn sentence with all the weight of a decade behind it.

You look at your hands. They are darker than Rafael's, thicker through the fingers, a wedding band on the left one that was never yours to put there and is now, apparently, the only ring you're wearing anywhere in the world. You turn the right hand over, study the callus map of it, the healing thumb, feel thirty-one years of good sleep still sitting in a spine that doesn't ache the way the last one did.

"Okay," you say to the room, to the streetlight, to nobody. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."