Colin Tarwater

Efraín's hands are what tell you first, before you've even decided anything: fifty years old, callused from forty years of clippers, aching at the knuckle in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the man who used to own them. You're standing in the shop in Eastern Kentucky, broom in hand, half a client's fade still swept into a comma on the floor, and Efraín's lower back has been talking to you all morning in a language you've learned to translate as *no*. It isn't pain exactly. It's a ceiling. You spun this wheel thirty times looking for rooms without ceilings, and every time you find one, it turns out to have a floor instead — a knee, a shoulder, a set of lungs that remembers being twenty years younger and resents you for the difference. You like Efraín fine. You are simply, quietly, done being fifty in a body that keeps reminding you it isn't yours to spend carelessly. So on your break, phone propped against the register, you open vessel.cards again, feel that same small drop in the stomach that never gets old no matter how many times you've felt it, and you spin.

It is the middle of the day where you're standing and the middle of the day somewhere else too, which means nothing lines up and everything does — you land face-down in unmade sheets with a stranger's arm hanging off the mattress, and the first thing you understand is that this is not morning here, wherever here is. The blackout curtain leaks one blade of afternoon light. The body under you breathes wrong for the hour, ragged going even, and you feel it happen — the arm lifting itself, folding up under a chest that isn't Efraín's sagging one but hard and flat and young, hands coming together like something in you already knew how to be still.

The room smells like a laundry list you didn't write: dryer sheets, bay rum, a faint ammonia ghost of setting lotion that never quite leaves a barber's clothes no matter how many washes. Your palms are folded against a chest with muscle stacked on it in the unthinking way of a man who works standing eight hours a day and doesn't call it exercise. Blond hair, cut close at the sides — you can feel the shape of it against the pillow, precise even asleep, a man who trims his own fade in a mirror at midnight because he's particular. The sheets under you are soft from age, not money. A rowhouse. You know that before you know it: the ceiling is close, the walls are thin, somewhere below a truck downshifts on a street with a name you don't have yet.

Then his hand — your hand now — finds the edge of the comforter as you shift, and it comes: a flash of this same hand curled around a set of clippers, the cord looped twice around the wrist out of habit, an old superintendent teaching a nineteen-year-old kid how to hold the guard steady, *you're not cutting hair, you're cutting confidence, don't rush a man's face.* The kid was Colin. He is Colin. The name arrives the way names do in this kind of arrival, quiet and total, no fanfare, just suddenly the only word for who you're wearing.

The T-shirt against your back — you're still in yesterday's, damp at the collar from the walk home — gives you the morning it went on, or rather the last time it went on, because you slept in your clothes again, because you always mean not to and never manage it. Sleeve by sleeve: Colin standing in this same low light near midnight, tired down in the marrow the way you only get from cutting eleven heads back to back on a Tuesday that ran into forty minutes of overtime nobody's paying him for, pulling the shirt over his head because showering felt like a chore that could wait for the next century. Night shift at the shop near Passyunk — the kind of place that stays open till ten for the guys who can't make daytime appointments — and underneath that, older, a whole stretch of years: barber school at twenty, a girlfriend who left because he forgot her birthday twice in one relationship and couldn't explain why remembering things that mattered felt like trying to hold water, the diagnosis at twenty-six that finally gave the forgetting a name that wasn't *lazy* or *selfish*, just wiring. Relief in that, more than shame. A ring on the nightstand — you feel your own fingers twitch toward where it isn't, the ghost motion of turning it over and over between thumb and forefinger, a tic older than the ADHD diagnosis, older than the ex, going back to a grandfather's ring he wears for no reason he's ever explained to anyone, least of all himself. A pouch of nicotine still faintly bitter somewhere at the back of a mouth that hasn't had a drink in its life, not once, by choice, no story behind it, just never wanted to.

The calluses on your palm — his palm — know a hundred thousand fades without being told to. Weight in the shoulders built from standing, not lifting. No marks anywhere, nothing to explain, no tattoo, no scar, just skin that has been out in Philadelphia weather its whole life and muscle that works for a living. Thirty-one years old and single, no ex who costs him anything to think about, no kids, nothing waiting on him except a floor full of hair he swept an hour before he lay down for the two hours between shifts that his body calls night no matter what the clock or the sun says.

You open your eyes. The curtain-blade of light hasn't moved. You lift your hand off your own chest and look at it — broader than Efraín's, younger, the calluses in different places, no ring on it now because it's on the nightstand, an inch from your reach and a whole life away from being yours by right.

"Guess I'm cutting hair again tonight," you say to the empty room, and you almost laugh, because you don't know yet if that's true, or for how long, or when the wanting comes back around to send you spinning off this one too.