Darnell Isaiah Whitlow

Mateo's hands are still in the sink, and they smell of formaldehyde and cold water. I have been in him three minutes and already know why I'm leaving. There was a fox on the table, glass eyes in a tray, and I was supposed to love the careful work. I only wanted the next thing. His shoulders ache from leaning over small dead animals, a muscular man with nothing to say to me. His phone lights up on the bench: *Mom*. I don't know her. I never will. The wheel is open on the screen. I pay, and I spin.

Then there is floor under me, cool through boot soles, and fluorescent light humming. The clippers are warm in my right hand, the cord trailing against my calf. A cape hangs over my left arm, heavy and slick. Air conditioning is losing to the heat leaking in at the glass door. A chair squeaks behind me. A man in it waits, and I have no idea what I was doing to him.

My thumb brushes the clipper's seam and a memory arrives. Eleven years old, his uncle's shop, a boy sweeping hair into a pile, proud when someone says *good*. The plastic grip is worn smooth where his hand has gone ten thousand times.

The comb in my shirt pocket presses my chest. Its teeth are missing in one place, and I know without looking that he loves it for that. His wife gave it to him, laughing, saying *you'll never replace it*. She stood in a kitchen doorway holding a toddler on her hip, and I feel the warmth of that doorway rising in my throat.

The shirt is soft denim gone stiff at the cuffs. This morning, in this shirt's memory, his arms went through the sleeves in a dark bedroom while a small voice down the hall asked for cereal. He buttoned it wrong once, and fixed it. Rosary beads were hooked on the dresser lamp. He touched them with one finger, not praying, just checking they were there. Money dread sat under his ribs like a stone: the shop loan, the card balances, a number he does not say aloud even to her. He breathes around it all day, every day.

The boots pinch at the left heel. Twenty-six, and his lower back already knows a full day of standing. His calves are tight, his wrists are strong, and my fingers want to move. They know the angle behind the ear, the lift of the comb, without me.

The ring is cool against my other finger. I feel the thin metal, and a Saturday, and a church that smelled of wax and old wood. Someone is laughing and crying at once. I'm inside the best day he ever had.

Without thinking, my free hand rises and slides over my scalp, into the springy afro, and comes down again.

I turn the clippers off. I hold my hand out and turn it over, palm, knuckles, the plain band.

I look up and say, "Well. Hello, Atlanta."

The chair squeaks again, and I wonder how long this one lasts.