Brandon Kleist

You are Kevin Tsukamoto, and you have been Kevin for less than a minute. The kitchen in Miami is bright and it is the middle of the morning. Your freckled hands are flat on a counter that isn't yours. Everything about him is the wrong size. The shoulders sit too narrow. The belly is a soft, honest fact. The coffee has not even cooled.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He was a man between jobs, and his silence has a dull hum in it, an unpaid-bill hum, and you hear it now like a refrigerator. You wanted something, and he has no wanting in him to hand you. So the page is open on the phone, the wheel is already turning, and your thumb is deciding for you.

The bathroom arrives all at once. The porcelain is cold under his left palm, and the air is damp and smells of mint. Your right hand is up at the jaw with a razor stopped against it. Half the face is foam, and the other half is bare and prickling. The window behind you is a pale blue, and the day has not started.

You pull the blade up the jaw, against the grain. The corner of the mouth comes and goes with no flinch at all, and the second half of the face is done in seconds.

Then the things around you start to speak. The tee is soft and washed thin. It remembers a drawer, and a hand, his hand, lifting it from a stack because the clean ones were gone. He sniffed it once and decided it would do. The sweatpants hang from a drawstring he knots twice because it frays. Under the shirt a weight sits across the shoulder blades, a sense of ink, and the cotton moves against it. Your mind goes dark and then a unit insignia rises in it. A recruiter's office comes with it, the cold of a folding chair, and a signature, and a pride so large it embarrasses him now. He wears it where no one sees.

The razor handle is rubber, ribbed, and the grip knows itself. Through it comes a store aisle under a buzzing fluorescent tube, and the tag gun in his fist, and the click-click of price stickers. A hundred boxes of cables are lined up and squared. Nobody ever thanks him, and he squares them anyway. Rent is a number he does the math on in the break room, over and over. It never gets bigger.

The rug under his bare feet is the cheap shag his mother gave him. A rosary was in the box with it, and it hangs now on a hook behind the door. You know without looking. He crosses himself at odd times, half ashamed, never quite stopping. You smell the faint ghost of a cigar on the towel. It was a good night, two weeks ago, a friend's porch, and laughter that rolled down his chest like warm water. His knuckles ache. They want to crack, and the thumb is already pressing the first.

You rinse the blade. You set it down. You hold both hands up in the mirror light and turn them over. They are wide and pale, with blond hairs on the backs. They are his.

You look up into the glass, and gray eyes look back and do not flinch.

"Well," you say, and the voice is rough with sleep, "hello, Brandon."

Somewhere under the foam and the mint the question is already there, quiet as a pulse. How long, and when will the wanting come back?