Tomás Ibarra

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Boston, and the body you wear is twenty-one and heavy and has been yours for less than a minute. Arjun Patel's thumb is still on the trackpad. The dimples have not even settled into your face yet. His mother's radio is murmuring in the next room, early, before the light, and the coffee he made you is going cold beside the phone.

You do not hate him. That's the trouble. He is fine. His hands are good and his shoulders carry a machine-shop tiredness that you could grow into. But you keep catching yourself waiting for him to be somebody else, and by the second minute you know the answer is the wheel again. You tell yourself it is only curiosity. You have never once believed that about yourself, so you pay and spin.

The kitchen goes out like a pulled plug.

Cold light, and a marker in your right hand, already moving. A laptop is clamped under your left arm, its aluminum edge biting the soft side of your ribs. The arm is mid-sweep. You've drawn the curve wrong, so you stop and draw it again slowly, correctly, and then ten more times, each one checked, though the curve has never needed checking. Your jaw is working a piece of gum. Mint, gone mostly to rubber. Your breath comes short and easy, and the belly pushes warm against the sweater.

The sweater is first. Wool, navy, the cuffs frayed soft at the wrists, and when your thumb finds the cuff it opens: a closet in a rowhouse, gray before sunrise, him sniffing the sweater to decide if it could go another day. It could. He pulled it over his head and the neck caught his ears. He tugged the hem down over his stomach with both hands, a habit older than any diet. Then the khakis, the button stiff, the belt notch he moved a hole last spring and did not mention to anyone. The boots, laced on the third marble step outside, the stone worn hollow as a bowl by a hundred years of other people's heels. He sat there with the sun just reaching the end of the block and thought about her. The ex. Not the whole of her. Just the way she used to say his name like a small correction. The memory comes with an ache low in the sternum that is entirely his.

The marker's cap, chewed flat at the end. Under it, an afternoon: standing here at this very board, a room full of people nodding, and him knowing before anyone that the model was lying. The quiet thrill of being right about a curve. It's the nearest thing he has to faith. He is spiritual, not religious. He believes the world has a shape that you can approach but never quite draw.

The vape is in his pocket. Your fingers know it before you do. His knees are good. His lower back carries a dull coin of ache. A big night once or twice a month has taught the body exactly what it owes. A little money is put away, and its quiet weight sits in him like a held breath.

You lower the marker. You turn your right hand over in the window light, the knuckles thick and the palm warm, and it feels like something borrowed from a stranger who will never ask for it back. You lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is deeper than you expected. "Hello, Tomás."

The gum is still going. Somewhere, a wheel is waiting, and you do not know whether you will be him by lunch.