Adrian Salcedo

You are standing in Gordon Pelletier's kitchen in Miami, and the coffee machine is making the sound it makes when it is empty. Fifty-four years of him sit in the knees. The belly presses the counter edge when you lean. The beard is full and itches under the jaw, and you have scratched it for eleven minutes, which is how long you have been him.

Nothing is wrong with him. He works. His phone is full of people who need him to answer. That is part of it: he is an operations manager, and by ten in the morning a stranger has already asked you for something four times in his voice. You did not want to be needed. You wanted to be wanted by your own hunger, and it came back before the coffee finished, quietly, the way it always does. The thumb finds the site. The wheel is already turning.

Then the sink is under your left hand, cold ceramic, and there is foam on half your face.

The razor is against your jaw and your arm is already moving. It goes up against the grain, past the corner of the mouth, no pause, and the second half of the face comes clean much faster than the first. Your breath is slow and young. The air is cool, and it smells of mint and wet towel. Through the window the sky is blue and not yet lit.

Your bare feet are on a rug. The floor tile is cold beneath it. You set the razor down on the counter, and the metal clicks. Your fingers go to your scalp and run back over the short fade and up into the thick hair on top, and with that touch something opens. A barber's chair in a strip mall, a man behind him saying leave the white, everybody asks about it, leave it. He was ten when it came in, one pale stripe overnight, and his mother touched it and said it was her father's. He has hated it and loved it in turns, and today he loves it.

The tank top is thin and clings across the shoulders. You pull at the hem and he gives you last night: this was the shirt he slept in because the heat under the tin roof does not break till dawn. The house is on posts. The yard outside is red dirt, and in an hour the glare will be white enough to hurt. He gives you the sound of the roof ticking as it cools.

The pants are soft and loose, and the drawstring is knotted because he never unties it. The memory is small: a hand at the waist in the dark, a woman's laugh saying you sleep like a soldier. She is gone. It was recent. It sits behind the breastbone like a swallowed stone, and you feel it as his and not yours, and you do not know her name yet.

The counter edge is hard under your palm. Calluses on the fingertips, not from labor but from keys, and from the guitar he stopped playing. The forearms are strong from the gym he pays for and goes to angrily. The back aches a little from a standing desk he still sits at too long. Two monitors, a cold coffee, a number in his head that is never quiet. The debt comes through the vape on the shelf, the little black pen: he reaches for it when the number gets loud. It is large, and it is real, and it is his, and now it is the weight you carry too.

Last, you lift your hands in front of the mirror. You turn the right one over. The palm is warm and wet from the sink. Then you look up into brown eyes that have never seen you, and say, low, "Okay. Hello."

You wait for how long this will last. Nothing in the room answers.