Declan Michael Farrow

You are in Esteban's body, in a kitchen in Boston, and the coffee has gone cold in the Marine's big scarred hand. For the better part of an hour you have been him. The nose that was once broken whistles on the left. The scalp under your palm is smooth as an egg, and the jaw keeps clenching without being told. Nothing is wrong with him. He is strong and compact, and he stands the way a man stands who has been shouted at into straightness. But he has a mother's rosary in the drawer, and a duty roster taped to the fridge. His whole week is already written in someone else's block capitals, and you can feel the schedule leaning on you like a hand on the back of the neck. You wanted a life, and you have been handed a rota. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and you let it turn.

Then you are leaning over a sink, and the cold porcelain edge is under your left palm.

Your right hand is at your jaw with a razor stopped against the skin. Foam covers half your face, cool and slightly tacky. The window is full of white haze, and the air smells of menthol and wet tile and, faintly, the sea. Your heartbeat is slower than the Marine's, and the body is lighter. Your forearms are banded in black ink, and your bare back is warm from the window.

Nothing is handed to you. You only touch things.

The porcelain first. Your palm on its curve opens a flash of a hostel in Lisbon, a sink exactly this cold, and a girl laughing through a closed door. She is not the girlfriend, and the feeling is one of leaving. Then the denim: the jeans sit stiff on your hips, and a whole morning comes up through them, the button he fought with, the belt he skipped, a recent argument still in his thighs. He pulled these on thinking of the ex, Marisol, whose name he has not deleted from anywhere. He keeps her number the way a tongue keeps a chipped tooth. There is guilt in it, because there is a girlfriend now, and the girlfriend is kind.

The razor handle is cheap blue plastic, and it gives you more. He is twenty. His father taught him to shave in a kitchen in Hialeah, standing behind him, saying go with the grain, mijo, always with, and then going quiet. Every morning since, the corner of the mouth is where he stops, a small hitch, a fear of nicking the lip. You feel it waiting in the muscle.

The ink on your arms tingles when you flex. Black tribal bands he got at eighteen on a dare, and also not on a dare. He went alone, paid cash, and told no one. The pain was sharp and clean and he loved it. His mother crosses herself when she sees them, and he lets her.

The sneakers on the tile are clean white and creased at the toe. Behind them, a pack waits by the bathroom door: a map, a half-planned year, three thousand dollars and a flight that leaves soon. He drinks too much on the nights before leaving anything. Last night is a dull tide in the skull. Under it runs a quiet Catholic ache, the habit of confession without a priest.

You do not need his corner of the mouth. You draw the razor up the jaw against the grain, past the place where he always hesitates, fast, clean, and finished.

You lift your hand out of the sink's light and turn it over. Freckled knuckles, a pale scar of nothing, tattooed wrist. They are not yours and they are yours.

You look up into the mirror, a boy with half his face still foam, and you say, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."