Walter Ishikawa

You are standing in Ramón Figueroa's kitchen in Philadelphia, and the house is asleep around you. Freckled forearms, stubble, a lab tech's chemical-clean hands flat on a counter. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the trouble. He has a standing Tuesday call with his mother. His knees are good. His life is good. You looked at all of it and felt nothing pull. A body that works isn't what you are hungry for. You are hungry for the second before the first breath in someone new. The wheel is open on the table, and you pay.

The floor goes. There is no travel.

You are at the foot of a bed with your hand halfway to a button. Carpet under sock soles. One lamp on, a glass of water sweating on the nightstand. The shirt is buttoned wrong by one, and the collar sits crooked under a tie hanging loose. You stop. Your palm goes flat to your chest and finds ribs under a soft belly, and a heart going steady, unhurried, a nurse's heart. The buttons come undone under your fingers and go back up correctly.

Then the shirt starts giving him up. Cotton against your back, worn thin at the shoulder blades, and with it comes a morning that is his: standing in this same spot, thumbs fumbling because the three a.m. shift starts in an hour and his eyes are still sticky with sleep. He irons on Sundays, always Sundays, because his mother did. The cuff against your wrist remembers a daughter, nine years old, buttoning it for him as a joke, tongue between her teeth. There are three children, and you feel all three arrive at once, a warm crowded weight in the chest. Then a woman, recent, the ache of it still raw. She left a hairband on this nightstand, and he has not moved it. You do not touch it.

The tie slides between your fingers, silk gone soft. A flash: a funeral, a dead patient's family thanking him in a hallway, his voice steady and his stomach not. Your hands tie it in a knot you never learned, quick and neat, something this closet has never seen. His feet ache in the arches. His lower back holds a dull, patient complaint from twenty-eight years of lifting strangers. There's the smell of laundry and cold water and a rosary dish somewhere near the lamp. He prayed here last night, badly, half asleep. He doesn't drink anymore. Nobody applauded that.

You lift your hands and turn them over. Short nails, a callus at the base of the fingers, a faint ridge where gloves have rubbed for decades. You look up at the dark window and your reflection looks back, a gray-haired stranger you are wearing.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Hello, Walter."

The lamp hums. You wait to feel whether he will hold, or whether the wanting is already stirring.