Cody Mersereau

Desmond Faraday's kitchen is too clean for eleven in the morning on a Sunday, and that is the problem. You stand in it in his body, pen in his hand, clicking it against the counter without having decided to, and you realize you have been standing here for six minutes doing nothing but that. Forty-seven years old, a good job, a body that does not hurt anywhere you have found yet. You spun the wheel eleven times to get somewhere exactly like this and now that you are here the quiet feels like a waiting room. It is not boredom, not exactly — boredom would at least have the decency to announce itself. It is the particular itch of a Sunday morning with nothing asked of you, and the site sitting there in a browser tab like a lit window in a house you've already half-left. You tell yourself one more. You always tell yourself one more. You set the pen down mid-click, open the laptop, and the wheel is already spinning before you've finished sitting down.

You are bent at the waist over a mop bucket in a school hallway, wringing a gray strand of cotton between two levers, and the motion comes out wrong — you push when you should pull — and then you do it again, slow, correct, and the next ten wringings come out checked, each one, like a man relearning a thing his hands have done ten thousand times. Outside the window beside you a saguaro stands black against glass-white morning light. The hallway smells like wax and old brick. Somewhere behind you a cart wheel ticks.

The body is thin — 5'8", no weight on it anywhere, like something built for crawling into vents — and it is twenty-seven years old in a way that announces itself through the knees already, a looseness that an older man's knees don't have. Your jaw is bare and smooth; you shaved it, you realize, though you don't remember doing it, except that you do, a little, now — cold water, a disposable razor going soft at the hinge, a bathroom with a bulb that buzzes. You run your tongue without meaning to across the gap in your front teeth before you know it's there to find.

The shirt against your back comes first, because it is the thing most against you, and it gives you the morning the way a key gives a lock: gray twill, a name patch that isn't a name, JANITORIAL stitched square and plain. You remember — he remembers, it arrives as his, not yours — standing in a bedroom with blackout curtains because the shift runs graveyard-adjacent and sleep has to be stolen at the wrong end of the clock, buttoning this shirt one-handed while the other hand held a church bulletin he'd meant to read and never did, services at ten he'll sleep through again, same as most Sundays, and the guilt of that sits in the chest like a stone that's been there so long it's smooth. Sleeve by sleeve: left arm first, because the left sleeve always sticks a little at the elbow where the fabric's gone thin, and it catches on the compass tattoo there, the one he got at twenty-two with money he didn't have, pointing nowhere, just pointing. Right sleeve next, rolled twice, revealing the other one — the woman's face in black and gray, a saint or maybe just a face, realism work that took four sittings and that he touches sometimes without noticing, like checking it's still there.

The keys at your belt are heavier than you expect, a fat ring of them on a carabiner, and they give you doors — a hundred doors down a hundred identical corridors, cafeteria, boiler room, the office with the good chair nobody's supposed to sit in but everybody does at 3 a.m. The mop handle in your hand gives you the job itself, five years of it, the whole arc of it: hired at twenty-two, thought it'd be temporary, wasn't. Nobody here to see him do it well, and he does it well anyway, because something in him needs the floors to be actually clean and not just clean enough, because what else is there to be careful about. No wife. A girlfriend once, two years, ended quiet, no particular villain in it, and he doesn't think about her so much as feel the shape of where she used to be, like a tooth that's been pulled. He goes to church when he can stay awake for it and feels bad about the Sundays he can't. He drinks too much maybe twice a month, sings badly, remembers it fondly. The belt against your waist gives you nothing, just leather, just the ordinary weight of a thing worn every day until it stops being a thing at all.

Your knees know how to bend into this motion. Your shoulders know the drag-and-twist of the mop without being told. The body is tired in the unspectacular way of a graveyard shift seven hours in, bones a little hollow with it, and underneath the tired there's something almost peaceful — a man alone in a building at an hour when the building belongs only to him.

You straighten up. You look down at your hand on the mop handle, turn it over, the tattoo moving with the tendons, the gap-toothed stranger's hand that is, for now, the only hand you have. You lift your eyes off it into the hallway light.

"Didn't even feel it," you say, to no one, in his voice, and go back to wringing out the mop, checking it twice.