Desmond Achebe

Gary Drennan's knees ache before you even stand up off his couch, and that's the whole reason, really — four minutes of him and already you hate the way his back complains when he leans for the laptop. Skinny fat, bald by a razor he didn't need to run, blue eyes gone glassy with beer he had already opened before you arrived in him. Somebody else's Tuesday, somebody else's rig schedule taped to the fridge you can see from here. You did not choose him and you are not going to grieve him. The site is still open in the browser, the wheel sitting there mid-spin from last time, cursor blinking over the button like it's waiting on you personally. You don't even finish the beer. You never do. That's not boredom exactly. It's closer to hunger that doesn't wait for the last plate to be cleared.

You click.

The sink arrives before you do — porcelain cold under a forearm, tile grout gray-green in bad light, and a razor already moving. Your jaw — not yours, his — is half foam, half bare, and the hand finishes the stroke up against the grain without the little hitch it always makes at the corner of the mouth. Smooth all the way. Muscle you didn't earn, doing something it already knew.

The mirror gives you brown eyes, freckles scattered like a spray pattern across a broad nose, textured black hair damp at the temples. Middle of the night here, wherever here is — the window behind the shower curtain is black, no gray in it, no traffic sound. A house asleep around this room. Body warm from something that wasn't sleep — a shift, maybe, work that runs against the clock everyone else keeps.

The razor is what starts it. Cheap steel, a weight worn into itself, and it opens a morning — not this one, an old one, years back — him nineteen and broke, buying this exact handle at a drugstore off Campbellton Road because the electric one broke and he had a shift in an hour. That flash breaks into more: shift after shift after that, always with skin under his nails he'd scrub and scrub and it wouldn't quite come clean, iron-smell in the creases of his knuckles that outlasted every shower.

The t-shirt against your back gives you the shop. Not this second — an afternoon, fluorescent and loud, sparks going out on concrete in little orange deaths around his boots, a helmet flipped up and sweat stinging one eye while somebody named Ray hollers something across the floor that makes him laugh so hard he has to put the torch down. He's good at this. His hands know a weld the way some men know a face — where it's about to fail before it fails, the exact sound of metal deciding whether to hold. Calloused palms, a burn scar he doesn't have because the facts don't give him one, just wear, just years of it printed into skin that never got soft.

The jeans on him — dark, worn at the knee where he kneels for low seams — bring back a different room, an apartment two exes ago, no — one ex, the one that matters, the only one that ever mattered: a man's laugh from a kitchen doorway, a fight about nothing that was about everything, a goodbye at a door that he still sometimes runs backward in his head at three in the morning trying to find the sentence that would have kept it from happening. Nobody in this house knows that story. Nobody in this cul-de-sac has heard that man's name in years. It sits in him anyway, low and constant, the leg starting its bounce even here, even now, foam still on half his jaw, knee going under a body he isn't standing on so much as steadying.

The floor tile under bare feet gives you nothing dramatic — just cold, just a house he bought himself, no wife's shoes by the door, no kid's toy left where someone could step on it. His own name on the mortgage. Comfortable, not showing it. A car outside that runs fine and says nothing about him. Faith never came looking for him and he never went looking for it. A beer maybe twice a summer, never a cigarette, not once, not even the year everything went sideways.

His arms in the mirror are heavier than any body you've worn — thirty-seven years old and none of it soft, six-foot-two of him folded down over a sink built for someone shorter. This is a body that has held its own weight against gravity every day of its life and never once complained where anyone could hear it. It is, you notice, the best one yet. You feel almost sorry about that, in the distant way you feel things that don't change your mind.

You straighten. Water runs. The razor sets down on the edge of the sink, chrome catching a light with no source you can find. You lift your hands — his hands — palm up, fingers scarred pale in a dozen small places from spatter and slip, and turn them over like they might tell you something they haven't already.

The leg starts up again beneath you, bouncing on its own, an old habit with no owner in the room to explain it to.

You look up into the mirror.

"There you are," you say, to no one who was ever going to answer.