Vikram Chandran

You are standing in Ernesto Villarreal's kitchen in Houston, and the refrigerator is the only thing awake. Sixty-one years old, five foot five, skinny. The linoleum is cold through his socks. His knees ache the way a help desk man's knees ache, from sitting. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you are bored by the inside of his mouth, which tastes of the cough drop he fell asleep on.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Somewhere in the first sixty seconds you opened the drawer by the stove and your hand found the tape measure, the pencil stub, the list his wife keeps of what is owed. You felt his worry as a weight in the chest, and it was small and decent and not yours. You wanted a man with nothing owed. You wanted a different weight. You open the page on his phone, and the wheel is already turning, ticking over names you will never know.

Then the kitchen is gone, with no travel and no warning.

You are face-down. Your cheek is in a pillow, and the breath going in and out of you is ragged, a snore broken in the middle. Then one breath, and it evens. Your arm swings up off the mattress by itself, and you roll onto your back, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. He has never slept that way once. Streetlight leaks orange through a gap in the curtains and lies across your eyelids.

You open them. The ceiling is stained. The room smells of dust, old sheets, and the sage that comes in through the window.

Your hand goes to the sheet first, and the cotton, worn soft, gives you a night: the trailer rocking in a wind, a woman's back turned to him, her hair gone gray, his palm resting on it a moment before he dared. Thirty-one years of that palm. Her name sits behind his teeth, and you do not say it.

The shirt against your back is a gray T-shirt washed thin. It gives you the morning he chose it, one sleeve at a time, left arm first because the left shoulder catches, the collar stretched from years of his thumb hooking it. He stood at the mirror and touched the rings in his ears, and the one in his nose, and was pleased with them. His daughter had pierced the first, laughing, a kitchen table, ice and a needle. He was fifty. He was afraid and did it anyway.

Your fingertips find the ragged edges of his nails, and the whole body knows what to do: the thumb goes to the mouth. A flash comes from it. Money, the sale of something, a number with many zeros, and him sitting in the truck afterward, unable to feel glad. He bought nothing. He still drives to the same grocery. He prays at the small shelf by the door, and the smell of camphor lives in his hands.

Under you is the mattress, and in you is the body. It is sixty-two years old and five foot nine, and it is not tired. The back is stiff and the bladder is full, but the lungs are wide, and the heart is slow, steady, unafraid.

You lift your right hand into the streetlight. The freckles run across the backs of the fingers. The wedding band is loose and warm. You turn the hand over, palm to the ceiling, then raise your eyes into the dark and say, quietly, "Well. Hello."

Somewhere a wheel is already waiting. You do not know how long he is yours. You lie there, listening to the wind, wondering how long before the wanting comes back.