Aaron Kleinman

You leave Colin Reidy standing in his own kitchen in Philadelphia, a kettle ticking toward the boil. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know what's wrong with him. He is a contractor, and he is good with a level and a stud finder, and his unibrow keeps pulling down over your eyes. You are a man who wanted something and could not name it, and the name arrives while his hand is still on the counter: you wanted to be small, quick, and unwatched. That is not something you'd say aloud. The wheel loads. You press.

The brush stops mid-stroke.

Foam on your lip. The tap running over the porcelain, cold, steady. You are barefoot on tiny hexagonal tile that is gritty and cool, and your jaw is full of mint and the hum of the bristles. You finish the stroke on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because your tongue finds a rough ridge there and wants it clean. You lean and rinse twice. The brush goes back in the cup, bristles up, out of the grey water it has always sat in. That was his habit, a small defiance of his roommate's damp, and you do it with his hand before you know why.

The mirror cabinet is slightly open. You see him in it: curls, stubble, a cleft in the chin like a thumbprint in dough.

Then the things begin to speak. The tile first: cold on the soles, and you are eleven, no, nineteen, in a different bathroom, a rented room in Flatbush, sneaking in at four a.m. with shoes in hand so nobody wakes. His shame is yours for a second, a cheap sweetness of vodka. The towel on the ring is rough, a little sour; you touch it and it hands you a girl laughing as she dries her hands on it and says it smells like a gym bag. She is the old girlfriend. He never really stopped hearing it. It lands under your ribs like a swallowed stone.

The T-shirt is soft from a hundred washes, thin at the collar. The morning he put it on, and not this morning but the one that mattered, comes sleeve by sleeve: right arm, left arm, head through, the neck hole snagging his ear. He wore it to his father's unveiling at the cemetery in Queens, under a jacket that didn't fit, the small stones from the path warm in his palm. He put one on the grave. He didn't cry, and then in the car he did.

The sleep pants are linen and loose on skinny hips. You hold the waistband and feel work in it: ten hours on his feet in an electronics aisle, a blue vest, a price gun heavy in his right hand, the click of it, the ache in the arches of the feet. Straightening boxes, faces out, until the shelf looks like nobody was ever there. His hands know it. Even now the fingers want to square something. He has maybe eleven thousand dollars to his name, and he knows the figure the way you know a bad tooth.

Your body, his body, is five-five and light; the sink sits oddly high at your hip. A faint thirst from a big night two days ago. The window above the toilet is gray with the hour, a pipe knocking somewhere in the wall. Nobody is home in him. You check the way you check a room after a guest leaves, and there is only the hum of a man's habits and the Hebrew of a blessing half remembered, before the water, every morning, mumbled without belief.

You turn off the tap. The quiet is enormous.

You lift your hands and look. Narrow, knuckly, a callus at the base of the right fingers where the price gun sits. You turn them over, palms, then backs, and flex them. They are very quick.

You look up into the mirror at his blue eyes and say, in his voice, a little hoarse, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

You don't know if you mean him or yourself, and somewhere behind the question the wheel is already turning.