Brian Keith Hollander

You are at the screen in the middle of a Wednesday morning, and nothing is happening. You have scrolled until the scrolling stopped meaning anything. For years you have been the person who reads the threads: waking up as somebody else, the films where the father and the son trade places, the stories where a stranger's hand rises in front of a face and is new. It was never for sale. Now there is a page with a wheel on it. You pay. You do not believe it. You spin.

Cold tile under bare feet. A bathroom, blue window, the light of a day not yet started. The razor is already moving in your right hand, up the jaw against the grain, and your left hand is flat on the cool lip of the sink holding up a body that leans forward. Foam on half your face. You pass the corner of the mouth without stopping. The second half goes faster than the first.

Then the things touch you, and he comes.

The long-sleeved shirt against your back is soft from washing, and it gives you the night before: a daughter's cough through the wall, his wife turning over, his own feet finding the floor in the dark so as not to wake anyone. He pulled these pajamas on out of the dryer, still warm, and he was grateful for the warmth without knowing he was.

The razor handle is cheap plastic, and it gives you a drugstore aisle, and his wife saying *you buy the fancy ones and you still bleed.* He hesitates at the corner of the mouth because a razor once caught him there at nineteen, before a date, and he has flinched ever since. You did not flinch. It feels like stealing something from him.

The wedding band touches the porcelain, a small click. Under it is a courthouse-cold October, then a kitchen where the two of them ate cereal at midnight, broke and laughing. The warmth in his chest is enormous and entirely his.

Your fingers curl and one thumb flicks, as if clicking a pen that is not there. Six monitors rise, a spreadsheet gone gray at eleven at night, the dull pride of a number that finally reconciles. He is good at it. He is bored by it. He has never told anyone he writes the same unsent email to a friend about quitting.

Under your feet, linoleum worn pale by the same steps. His knees ache a little. His lower back holds the stoop of years at a desk, and his belly presses the sink's edge, soft and unembarrassed. The air smells of mint, wet towel and old wallpaper glue. A faint holiday-table memory comes, of his grandmother's language, a prayer murmured over bread, and a grief too old to have edges.

You set the razor down. You look at your hands, the ring, the freckled knuckles. You turn them over. You look up into the mirror at a stranger's brown eyes, foam on half his jaw.

"Okay," you say, quietly. "Hello."

The house is silent. Somewhere down the hall a child sleeps, and she is yours now only by borrowing. You wonder how long. An hour. A year. Whether the wanting comes back before the foam dries.