Colby Renshaw

You are standing in a break room that smells like bleach and burnt coffee, holding a mop you have not chosen to hold, in a body that is not the problem so much as everything around it is. Kevin Straczynski's knees ache from a floor that never ends. His shift badge says 6:47 and it might as well say never. Eight minutes in him and you already know the whole shape of the rest of his life without asking anyone — the same hallway, the same buffer machine, the same fluorescent hum going nowhere. You did not spin fourteen times to stand still in a stranger's ache. You lean the mop against the vending machine, take out your phone with his blunt, chapped fingers, and open the page with the wheel on it. You do not think of it as murder. You never have. You think of it as leaving early.

The wheel turns and there is no in-between, no falling, no darkness to cross — one moment you are watching pixels spin on a cracked screen in Detroit and the next you are bent at the waist over a sheet of lumber, saw already screaming in your grip, the Texas dark just starting to go gray at the edges of a job site ringed in barbed wire. Your hand — his hand — jerks the saw a half inch wide of the line. You correct it, slow, deliberate, like a man double-checking a math problem he already knows the answer to. The cut finishes clean. You ease off the trigger. The blade spins down into silence, and dust hangs gold where a work light catches it.

Then it comes in through your skin, the way it always does — not given, just touched into you. The grip of the saw first: your palm knows the weight of it before you do, knows the drop of the trigger guard, knows this saw specifically, the little nick in the cord six inches from the plug that you have caught with your boot before and cursed at. The board under your other hand holds a whole autumn in it, an afternoon your mother — no, his mother — stood at the edge of a slab in Lubbock and said the framing looked crooked and it wasn't, and you (him) laughed about it in the truck after with a beer sweating between your knees.

The vest against your shoulders remembers being pulled on before five, in a house with a window unit rattling and a dog scratching the door, the orange fabric stiff with old sawdust that never fully shakes out. Under it a gray tee, soft from washing, and under that the skin memory of the tattoo needle, hours of it, the portrait on your arm a face you knew once and still flinch a little to look at directly — a woman, an ex, inked there before the current girlfriend, who has never once asked you to cover it, which is its own kind of grace you have never told her you noticed. The earlobes carry the small cold weight of studs put in half drunk on a dare at twenty-two. The jaw, freshly shaved this morning by his own razor, does not itch, does not remember stubble, only remembers the blade being careful around the dimples he has stopped seeing in mirrors because they are just his face now, they don't mean anything, they just show up whether he's smiling or not.

The boots on the gravel remember every gravel road there has ever been — this one, the girlfriend's driveway, the ex's old apartment lot two towns over where you used to sit in the truck bed at 2 a.m. and not go in. The belt at your waist remembers the toothpick riding in your shirt pocket, the one your mouth wants right now, jaw working at a phantom sliver of wood out of habit that started before you can remember starting it — a habit from quitting cigarettes for a girl who didn't stay, kept for a girl who did. The muscle across your back and forearms remembers ten thousand mornings of this exact motion, saw to board, board to wall, wall to house, house to check, deposit, six-pack, sleep, repeat — thirty-four years old and none of it wasted, a little money put by that nobody on this job site would guess at, a quiet satisfaction underneath the sawdust that you (he) built something that morning that will outlast the both of you, whoever "you" turns out to be today.

Somewhere behind you a truck door slams, another man laughs at something not meant for you, and the water tower stands pale on the horizon like it's been waiting since before either of you were born.

You look down. The hand is broader than yours ever was, calloused along the base of the fingers, a fine gray dust settled into the creases like it lives there. You turn it over once, slow, watching the tendons move like they belong to somebody being introduced to themselves. Behind you the toothpick is already between your teeth before you noticed picking it up. You lift your eyes to the crew, to the light coming low and orange across the frame of a house not yet a house, and you say, around the toothpick, quiet enough that only the nearest man hears it:

"Cut that board again. I don't like the line."