Darius Whitlow

You have been Efraín Maldonado for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong with him. He's fine. His back is fine, his dimples work, the goatee is easy. But you stand in his kitchen in the middle of a Thursday morning, a coffee going cold on a counter he doesn't own anything on, and you cannot stop listening to how quiet he is inside. Nothing in there argues. Nothing in there wants. You wanted something and he had no idea what it was. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you let go of him the way you set down a cup.

You don't feel him go. You feel the sink.

Porcelain edge under the left palm, cold and slightly gritty. You are bent forward, the weight of you pushed down into your arches, the slides slick under white socks. Foam on half your face, the smell of menthol and something sweeter underneath. The razor is stopped against your jaw. Then your wrist moves, and it goes up the jaw against the grain, quick, past the corner of your mouth where something in you flinches and then doesn't, and the second half is done faster than the first.

The hoodie isn't on you. A black t-shirt, washed soft, sticks at the shoulder blades, and when you shift, the fabric pulls and the morning comes up through it. His hands pulling it off a chair, because the clean ones were in the dryer and he couldn't face the stairs. A smell of smoke in the collar. Twenty years old, and a body that is wide and warm and tired in the thighs, a belly that rests against the sink and doesn't apologize. A cough sits low in the chest, a pack-a-day cough, patient.

Your right hand lets go of the razor and rinses it, and the fingers keep going to your pocket, looking for something. A ring. You find it on the sink ledge instead, a thin silver band, and the hand picks it up and turns it over and over without asking you. Her. A girl on a cable footbridge over brown creek water, green shade, her laugh coming back off the planks while his boots thumped. He gave the ring to her once and she handed it back at the same railing. He has been turning it ever since. It hurts in a flat, dull place under the sternum, and you realize that is where he kept her.

The floor tile is cold through the sock. The calf itches. You don't look down, but the memory comes up through the skin anyway: a chair, a needle's hum, a name and a date lettered in script, Marcus, and a boy's grief that never found anywhere else to go. He sat very still for it. He didn't cry until the car.

A laptop on a campus lawn, grass pricking the backs of his arms, a deadline blinking. Not enough money, never enough, under five thousand to his name and a number on a phone screen he avoids. A cigarette in the cold. Not praying exactly, but looking at the hills and feeling something look back.

You turn the water off. The mirror gives you a stranger with half a beard of foam, and you wipe the rest away with a towel that smells of him.

You hold your hand up in the light from the window. Turn it over. The palm is broad and creased, the ring still pinched between two fingers. It's not yours. It's yours now.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Okay. Hi."

The ring ticks against the porcelain. Somewhere a clock you can't see is counting, and you wait to find out how long this one holds.