Dominique Fairweather

Arturo Peña's hands are steady, always have been, sixty-two years of steady, and that is the whole problem tonight. You are sitting in his recliner with the television off and the phone bright in his lap, and you hate how good these hands still are at nothing in particular. A nurse's hands. Gentle, competent, done for the day. You have been him less than a minute of clock time and forty years of borrowed muscle memory, and already the apartment is pressing in — the oxygen concentrator humming in the back room for a wife who is not yours, the smell of decongestant and old coffee, a Friday evening with nowhere in it. You did not spin because Arturo's life is bad. You spun because it is small enough to see the whole shape of it from the recliner, and seeing the whole shape of a thing is the fastest way to stop wanting it. The card in your hand — his hand — still says Ohio. You open the site instead. The wheel is already turning before you've decided anything, the way it always is.

The power drops for two seconds in a shop in Western Kansas, and when it comes back you are sitting in a tattoo chair with your forearm strapped down and green soap cooling on broken skin, and the arm has stopped flinching because you are not the one who was flinching. The needle keeps working. You watch it the way you'd watch someone else's hand doing someone else's job, and for a moment that is exactly true.

The chair is real under a body that is not — six-five, folded into it, knees higher than they'd be in any chair built for a smaller man. The shirt is the first thing that talks. It's draped over one shoulder like a cape, sleeve rolled back on the arm getting worked, and the flannel against your neck gives you a morning: standing in a bedroom with low ceiling light, a woman's voice from the kitchen asking if he wants eggs, pulling this shirt on one arm at a time because the other one's already sore from yesterday's cuts, favoring it without thinking, the way you favor a hand that's been gripping clippers since seven that morning. The cotton remembers being buttoned distractedly, mind already three blocks over at the shop, mind on the eleven-thirty who always runs late.

The jaw that just went loose belongs to Dominique Fairweather, thirty years old, and his memories don't arrive in order, they arrive in weight. The clippers are not in his hand right now but his hand still knows them — the two-second habit of listening to the motor's pitch to tell if the blade's caught a snag, the rhythm of fading a neckline without looking because his eyes are on the mirror checking the client's face for the moment he can make him laugh. Sweeping hair at the end of a chair, the smell of it, powder and aftershave and the particular quiet after the buzzing stops. A shop full of noise that isn't unkind. Two kids' faces come up out of nowhere, a boy who wants his head shaved just like Daddy's, a girl half his height already bossing him around — and the ache that comes with them isn't yours, it's his, arriving through nothing you're touching, just close enough now to leak through.

Under your shoulder blades: the vinyl of the tattoo chair, cool through the shirt. Under your palm, gripped without meaning to grip it: the edge of the padded armrest, and through that, a whole year — deciding on this piece, choosing this artist off a recommendation, sitting through two other appointments that got scheduled and rescheduled around the shop's hours because Fridays close early in a wheat town and everybody, everybody, needs a Friday cut before Saturday. Weather comes back too, unbidden — a thunderhead stacking up black over stubble fields on the drive over, the light gone that yellow color that means everyone in town is watching the sky instead of the road.

Your jaw aches faintly from being clenched an hour and only just released. Your shoulders carry a standing man's fatigue even sitting down — all day on his feet between chairs, the small pains of that collected in his lower back, in his calves, ordinary and old and his. Gum, dry now, tucked forgotten in one cheek — his hands don't reach for it, they never had to reach for anything, chewing being a thing that just happens to him, unconsidered as breathing. No lighter in any pocket, no ring on any finger, though a face comes with that fact too — a woman waiting on him at home tonight, two kids probably already fed, and the small permanent gladness under everything else that he gets to go back to that.

The tattoo needle stops. The artist across from you says something you don't quite catch, waiting on an answer that isn't coming from wherever he expects it.

You look down at the arm — his arm, green soap and ink and blood in thin lines under cling film, forearm still strapped where the machine left it — and you turn the hand over slowly, like you're checking whether it followed you here.

"Sorry," you say, in his voice, low and unhurried, still finding the bottom of it. "Lost it for a second there."