Adrián Ceballos

Colton Aldrich's shift starts in ten minutes and his feet already hurt. Twenty-one, six-two, built like a door, standing in the break room in a uniform that never quite fits right across the shoulders, and this body has been yours for less than a minute and already you know it isn't going to be enough. Not the size of him, not the dimples the other guard keeps ribbing him about, not the radio crackling on his hip with somebody else's problem. You didn't come back for a reason you'd say out loud. You came back because a minute wasn't enough time to want anything, and wanting is the whole point, and the phone is already in your hand — his hand — thumb finding the site out of habit that isn't even his yet. You pay. You spin. You do not finish the thought about why.

The razor is already moving when you land, up along the jaw, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth. That's the first wrongness — some other rhythm finishing a stroke he didn't start — and then it's just you, doing it, foam on the left cheek gone slick and thin under warm water, the right cheek already bare and stinging faintly with aftershave he hasn't put on yet. Shorter. Lighter. A sink that comes up higher on this frame than it should, green tile going gray-white with hard water stains, a window with morning coming through it wrong — too bright, too flat, a Kansas Monday nobody in Rural Texas would recognize as the same hour.

The towel under your left hand is where it starts. Threadbare, bleach-smelling, and there's a whole year in it — folding laundry in this same bathroom while Marisol talked through the wall about her sister's wedding, the two of you splitting rent on a house with plumbing older than either of you. The razor itself gives you more: buying it at the Dillons on 40 because the drugstore in town closed, standing in the aisle doing the math on generic versus name-brand the way you do math on everything now, since the gym cut his hours and Marisol picked up the slack without ever once making him feel it.

The mirror gives you his face going still when Renata Luz's name comes up on his phone and how long it takes him to not answer it. Nine months since Renata, and it still isn't nothing — she used to sit on the edge of this tub with her knees pulled up watching him do exactly this, exactly this motion, and telling him he always missed the same spot at the corner of his mouth, every single time, like his hand knew to leave it for last. That's why he was slow there. That's the joke that isn't a joke anymore.

The shirt on the doorknob, navy, technical fabric, brings the gym floor: Tuesday's client, an older man with a bad knee, the two of you counting reps out loud in the flat fluorescent light while wheat trucks rumble by outside on the highway. The whistle on its cord, still around his neck from yesterday or the day before, brings the whole shape of the job — early mornings, the smell of rubber mats and other people's sweat, the particular tiredness of being cheerful for eleven hours straight for people who are paying you to be. Church on Sundays, half out of habit, half because his mother would know if he stopped. Fingernails bitten down close, an old thing, worse in months when money got thin, which is most months.

None of it is much. That's the freckled, sunburned, faithful, ordinary shape of it — a man scraping by in a town nobody leaves, loved adequately, missed by someone who isn't there anymore, doing the same forty strokes with a razor he's done ten thousand times.

You look down. Small hands for the work they do — calloused across the palm from bar grips, nails bitten to the quick, foam drying tacky on the left one where it brushed his cheek. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real, and you lift your eyes to the mirror instead of out a window, because that's where the face is.

"Okay," you say to it, quiet, like you're only telling yourself. "Let's see how long you're good for."