Curtis Hembree

You are twenty-three and five foot five and you have been Rohan Menon for less than a minute, and already you hate how little of the room he fills. The monitor in front of you is dark at the edges. It is the middle of a Miami morning, and his badge hangs on its lanyard like a promise to someone else. You took him for the quiet, the clean fast hands, the way he reads a log file like a face. What sent you back is smaller than that. Three clicks in, the lights went green on a network that was not yours, and you felt nothing. Not greed, not fear. You would not say it aloud. You put the card down and the wheel was already turning.

Then you are leaning over a sink with your elbow out, and the razor is against your jaw.

The air is damp and smells of menthol and old porcelain. Half your face is foam, cool and thick, and the other half is bare and stinging. The window is bright with green shade off the trees. Your belly presses the rim of the basin. Your knees ache, quietly, the way a school floor teaches them to. A band of gold sits on your left hand where it grips the sink.

The shirt is the first thing that speaks. The gray cotton sticks at your shoulder blades, and you remember the morning in his hands: the drawer that sticks, the sleeve turned right side out, the buttons on the henley done wrong and done over. His wife's voice from the kitchen, not words, only the tune of them, tired and kind. A stairwell light that never worked. He thinks about the debt in the dark like a second mortgage on his sleep. Sixty thousand, maybe more, and the number has a taste.

The razor handle is cold and thin. Your fingers drum on the porcelain, fast, a rhythm with nothing in it, and a whole year opens behind it. A cigarette he gave up at the kitchen table when his daughter cried. A cable footbridge over brown water, boards humming under his boots, his son on his shoulders, the creek loud.

Your tongue finds the corner of your mouth, where the skin is tender, and you almost hesitate there, you feel the old habit of it, and you do not. You drag the blade up against the grain and it is done, clean, a second half faster than the first. Your nose, crooked, catches the light in the glass when you lift your head.

You look at your hands. The wedding band is worn thin on the inside. The knuckles are thick, the nails cut square, the palms ready for a mop handle, a ring of keys, a long hall after everyone has gone.

You look up at the mirror, into hazel eyes that are not surprised.

"Well," you say, in a voice like gravel in a bucket. "Let's see how long you last."