Aaron Kessler

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to think about what you're doing. White text on black: *you pay, you spin, you get a man.* You have read every thread about this kind of thing since you were a teenager, the old creepypastas, the fan fiction, the late-night what-if of being someone else entirely, skin and history and all. Nothing on any of those threads ever cost anything. This one does, and you pay it without letting yourself hesitate, because hesitating is how you talk yourself out of things at this hour, on this particular kind of dead Saturday where the ceiling has already told you everything it knows. The wheel spins. It is gaudy, cheap-looking, the graphics of a slot machine built by someone who didn't care. It stops on a card you don't have time to read.

There is no falling, no tunnel, none of the things you imagined. There is a sink, cold and wet under one hand, and a razor stopped halfway up a jaw, foam gone thin and gray with old strokes. The face in the mirror is not a face you have ever seen and it does not startle, because there is no time between not-being-here and being-here — you are already leaning at this exact angle, already holding this exact breath. The razor finishes the stroke on its own, up and against the grain, and skips the little hesitation at the corner of the mouth that isn't yours to know about yet. It just happens, fast, like a hand that has done this ten thousand times and doesn't need you for it.

The mirror light is the ugly kind, two bald bulbs over the glass, and behind you through the door there's a slice of a room too dark to read. Your — his — feet are cold on tile. That's the first thing that isn't the razor: cold feet, bare, and under them a memory surfaces unbidden, tile put in eight years ago by a landlord who charged for it anyway, a garage-under-a-house rental with a driveway so steep the car scrapes its bumper every single time, and a bay window upstairs that isn't his, was never his, just leaks light down through the floor joists into this room at the wrong hours.

The razor goes down on the edge of the sink and the hand that set it there remembers other hands on it — the weight of it, replacing blades every few weeks because he presses too hard, always has, since he was nineteen and his father showed him how over a different sink in a different city. There's a rhythm here that has nothing to do with grooming: shave, dress, drive to work in the dark because the tables open early for the tourists who never sleep. He deals blackjack. The thought comes with the actual feel of a deck fanning under his fingers, the specific give of card stock against a callus that's been there so long it doesn't register as one, and underneath that a whole stretch of nights: fluorescent break rooms, ashtrays he isn't supposed to have, the taste of gum chewed to nothing between hands to cover the smoke on his breath. A pack a day, easy math, easy shame, something his wife stopped fighting him about two kids ago.

His wife. The wedding band is right there on the hand still resting on the sink's edge, plain gold, worn thin at the underside where it rubs the finger raw in humid weather, and touching the porcelain under it opens something wider: her voice down the hall telling him not to wake the kids, the particular tiredness of a marriage that works most days and some days doesn't, and threaded through it, uninvited, a woman who isn't her — an old flame from before, whose name arrives with a taste like something spilled and never quite cleaned, a want that never fully closed even after all this time. He loves his wife. He also carries the other thing, small, folded away, the way people do.

The t-shirt against your back is thin cotton, worn translucent at the shoulders from years of washing, and it gives up the morning he put it on — not this morning, an ordinary one, sleep still in him, stepping into these same gray boxers with the plaid check, pulling this shirt overhead half-asleep while his wife's alarm was still going off in the other room. Getting dressed for nothing, because he was already going back to bed after his shift, this whole night inverted, work is where morning used to be. Middle of the night for him and middle of the night wherever you came from too, except his clock runs backward against the city's, everyone else asleep while he shaves for a shift that starts before the sun even considers it. That's the ache behind the eyes, a whole life tuned to the wrong hour, the high cholesterol his doctor keeps mentioning, the drink that's become less an event and more a wallpaper, the two kids down the hall who think their dad works nights because casinos are magic instead of because rent is a steep driveway and a garage that floods when it rains.

None of it is dramatic. It's just a life, worn into this body the way the shirt is worn at the shoulders, the razor worn to his grip, the felt of a blackjack table worn smooth by his own palms sweeping chips into racks at the end of every shift, alone, lights dimmed, before anyone else comes in.

You look down. The hand is not yours — five foot six of a man's whole weight settled into it, a scar through one eyebrow catching the bathroom light when you tip your head, foam drying tacky on the half of the jaw not yet touched. You turn the hand over once, like checking it's real, and it is, in the only way anything has ever been real to you.

"Okay," you say to the mirror, to him, to no one. "Okay."

Somewhere a wheel is still spinning, waiting for you to want something else. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time. You don't know, and for once, not knowing doesn't feel like a problem to solve.