Dalton Pierce Merrill

You are standing in Alfredo Gil Menchaca's kitchen with the coffee going cold, and the thing you cannot do is stop noticing his knee. It has been telling you about the stairs since you got up. A broken nose that whistles when he sleeps. A manager's chair that fits him like a verdict. Forty-four years of a man who has already decided what Wednesday is. You have worn him for less than a minute of your own reckoning and already you know the whole room: the mortgage envelope, the good pen, the window that shows only another window. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He works, he is heavy and sure, and you are bored in the particular way of someone who has the key to every door and keeps walking back to the same one. You open the page. The wheel is already turning. You press.

The sink is cold under your left hand. Foam on your jaw, and the razor stopped against the bone, and the whole bathroom arrives at once: white window light, the drip in the pipe, the sweet chemical mint of the shaving cream. Your arm is already moving. The blade goes up the jaw against the grain, past the corner of the mouth, and it does not hesitate, because you do not know that he always did.

The razor's handle is thin plastic, and it gives you something. Not a picture. A feeling: the careful, flinching slowness at the corner of the lip, a nick from years ago, his own small private fear of his own face. You finish the second half faster than the first, and the cheek comes up smooth under your fingertips.

The black shirt hangs from your shoulders. It is soft with washing, and the collar has gone loose. Then the morning arrives, sleeve by sleeve: he pulled it from the pile on the chair because the clean ones were all in the dryer at his mother's, and he thought, vest day, nobody sees the shirt. He stood in the cold room with the shingles ticking outside, silver and wet. Pulling the jeans on, he felt how loose they had gone at the waist since the winter, since her. The ex. A name sits just under the surface of him, not given, only the ache of it, a toothbrush in the cup that is still hers, though he has not said so to himself. He keeps leaving it.

The floor is gritty under the canvas sneakers. Your knuckles want to crack, and you let them, one hand and then the other, and a whole year opens: stockroom boxes, the cold aisle of phone chargers, a manager who calls him buddy, the vape pen in the vest pocket on breaks, sweet and blue. Lobster traps stacked in the dooryard. Twenty-some thousand saved in an account he looks at like weather. His skinny arms, strong in the wrong places, wiry from lifting cartons. Five foot five, and the mirror is exactly at your eyes. The gap between your front teeth catches your tongue.

You set the razor down. You turn your hand over under the window, thin wrist, chapped knuckles, a pale line of foam by the thumb. It is a stranger's hand and it is yours, and it will be yours until the wanting returns, tomorrow, or in four minutes. You lift your eyes to the glass.

"Hello, Dalton," you say, and the gap whistles on the s.