Alberto Quiroz

You are standing in a kitchen in Ohio with a coffee going cold, in the body of Dale Wisniewski, who you have been for less than a minute. His belly presses the counter edge. His knees ache in a way you did not ask for. The thing that sent you back is small: your thumb found the phone on the table, and the lock screen was a daughter you do not know, and she looked at you, through the glass, like she expected something. You cannot be expected. So you open the page with the wheel, and you pay, and Dale's thumb is steady, and you spin.

Then there is a sink under your left hand, cold porcelain, and foam on half your face, and a razor stopped against your jaw.

No travel. The bathroom is already here, with its warm bulbs and the frosted window going blue. You are leaning, and your spine knows the lean. Your breath comes slow and a little wet through the menthol of the foam.

The razor moves. Up the jaw, against the grain, and your wrist does not stop at the corner of the mouth, where something in him always stops. You go straight through it. The second half goes faster than the first.

The sleeve of the long gray shirt drags on your forearm, and it opens. He pulled it from the drawer in the dark so as not to wake her, and the cotton was soft from a hundred washes, and he thought, absurdly, of the first winter in this apartment, the radiator knocking, her cold feet. The slipper soles are worn flat. Under them the rug, and with it a boy's bare feet on a different rug, his mother saying his name in two languages. Your right hand is cracking its own knuckles against the razor handle, one, two, and a church comes with it: a pew, the smell of wax, a rosary in a pocket he stopped carrying and still reaches for.

The ring on your left hand is warm from the sink. Thirty years sit in it. A daughter's graduation. A drink or two each evening on the stoop, the street shining wet under the sodium lights, the cigarette he gave up and still tastes when he is tired. A glass office with the door always open, because he decided long ago that a manager who closes it is hiding something. Your shoulders hold that decision. Your back is stiff, your knees fine, your hands strong and quick.

You rinse the blade. The water runs. You set the razor down and turn your hand over under the light, the ring, the knuckles, the palm.

You look up into the mirror and into whoever is there.

"Morning," you say, in his low voice, testing it.

And underneath, already, the question: how long will this one hold?