Casey Ryan Lindqvist

You are in Darnell's chair, in Darnell's back room, and the clippers are still warm in your hand from the last fade of the afternoon. Six minutes. His knuckles ache from the cold the shop's air conditioning keeps. You have been listening to a man in the chair talk about his daughter's recital, and you have been nodding in the right places, and the whole time you have been thinking: I could not do this. Not the talking. The patience. Darnell has it the way a river has a bed. You do not. You go to the mirror and the line he cuts is perfect, and you feel nothing at all. So you thumb the phone with his thumb, and the wheel is already turning.

The courtyard comes up cold and white. You are standing in the middle of a gesture, right hand open in the air, as if you had been explaining something to the wall. Your left arm holds a clipboard against your ribs. Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to.

The first thing is the keys. They hang from a carabiner at your hip, and when your fingers close on them the brass bites, and it comes: the key for the vacant unit, a stiff one, that sticks in the lock unless you lift the door as you turn. He learned that in his first week. A tenant had watched him fight it and said nothing, and he had gone home ashamed and practiced on his own door until it stopped mattering. The feeling is hot in the face, in his shame, not yours.

The clipboard next. The wood is smooth where a thumb has worn it. Inspection sheets, ticks in a tidy hand. Under the ticks, a flash: his girlfriend's handwriting on a sticky note pressed to the top sheet this morning. Eat something. He did not. The note is still there, curling at the corner, and something in your chest that is his goes soft and a little guilty.

The polo is navy and a size honest to a man of five-six who works out. It lies against your shoulders, and the morning arrives sleeve by sleeve. His left arm first, in the dark of the garage under the bay window, the cold white light coming down the steep driveway. The cuff of the sleeve tight over the biceps. The chinos pulled from the chair, the knees faintly dirty. The boots laced hard, the left one first, always. A cigarette between each step, the pack a day, the lighter flicking with the same thumb that holds your keys now. Your lungs know it: a low scrape under the breastbone, a dry want.

Your nose has been broken, and you can feel it when you breathe in, the air going a little crooked. A flash: a pickup game, an elbow, a hot gush, his friend laughing and then not. He prayed that night, evangelical, simple, asking for nothing in particular. The words are still in the body like a hymn you cannot place.

Under your boots the concrete is damp and uneven. You are tired in the strong way, the calves, the quads, a body built for use. Twenty-three years old and no one has told it to slow down. The debt sits in him too, a gray weight, not his fault entirely, and he carries it like a bag he forgot to put down.

You lift your hand and look at it. The calluses are real. You turn it over. Then you look up, at nothing, at the lens of the morning.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, a little hoarse. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The leg keeps bouncing. You do not know whether you are him tomorrow.