Callum Treloar

You are standing in a garage in Western Kansas with a torque wrench in Raul Dominguez's hand, and the thing that sent you back is a small, stupid thing. A customer's truck. You could feel exactly what was wrong with it, the way his fingers knew the sound of a worn bearing, and you could not make yourself care. His competence sits in you like a coat that fits someone else. The radio plays. The concrete is warm through his boots. His knees ache in the specific way of fifty-four. You set the wrench down on the fender, wipe his palms on his coveralls, and open the page with the wheel on it. You do not decide. You press.

The sink is cold under your left palm.

Foam on half your face, the razor stopped against the jaw. Water running. Your own breath, a different breath, goes in through a nose that has never been yours. A lamp is humming over the mirror and the window behind is blue with the hour before anything. The razor moves. Up the jaw, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth without a pause, and the second half goes quicker than the first, and you did not tell it to. The hand knows.

Then the things come, because you are touching them.

The razor's rubber grip: a Sunday-night ritual, this man standing in a shop aisle choosing between two packets and picking the dearer one because a girl once said his jaw looked raw. Her name is not given. Only the feeling is, a low warm ache with an old sting under it, the ex who still matters, a phone he has not deleted her from.

The porcelain edge: his forearm there is thin-skinned, freckled, and under it a softness at the middle that he hates and carries anyway, skinny-fat, a body that works all day and still will not harden. His lower back is sore from yesterday, a screen door on a stranger's porch, the hinge side, holding the weight on his knee while he drove the screws. The pleasure of it swinging true. Nobody at the house said anything and he went home pleased.

The grey cotton shirt, thin at the collar. He slept in it. Before that, in the dark, a vape pulled in the kitchen, sweet and chemical, standing at the bench while the kettle ticked. His other hand, on the sink, is clicking. A pen that is not there. Thumb, thumb, thumb, against the porcelain. You make it stop and feel it start again.

The tap water, warm now over your wrist: his mother's church, a hall with a tea urn, hymn books with cracked spines, a kindness he never argued with and never quite believed. Money he has that nobody guesses, a number in an account that does not match the jacket he wears, the brown one with the elbow worn pale. He is saving it for something and has not yet found the something.

Harbor smell through the glass. Gulls. A ferry horn, far off, deep.

You rinse the razor under the tap. You turn your hand over. Freckles run down to the knuckles, the skin on the palm hard as a dried leaf, a callus at the base of each finger from handles. You watch it close and open. Then you lift your eyes to the mirror, to the blue eyes and the clean jaw.

"Morning," you say, and his voice is lighter than you expected.

Outside the day has not started. You wonder how long you get this one, whether the wanting stays quiet till the kettle boils, or till noon, or only until you stop looking.