Donald Bierschbach

It is the middle of a Friday morning where you are, which is to say nowhere in particular, just a screen and a mug gone cold and a browser tab you opened the way you open all of them, half not believing it. Years of this. The threads at two in the morning, the forums, the stories you read with the lights off like they were something to be caught at. Always a door you could only stand outside of. Then a site with a plain name and a wheel on it, and a price that felt almost insulting for what it claimed, and you paid it before you could talk yourself out of being the kind of person who would.

You spin. There is no ceremony. The wheel just stops.

And you are at a sink, mid-stroke, a toothbrush working the back left molars of a mouth that is not yours and now is, foam gone thin and sour at the corner of lips you did not choose, tap running loud in a small tiled room. No fall, no falling — you are just here, already leaning, already this tall, already carrying a gut you can feel pulling gently at a waistband. The brush stutters. Starts again, slower, on the other side, because some instinct under you finishes what he started before you even know there's a you and a him to separate.

You rinse. Twice, out of habit that isn't yours yet but is already running the show. You stand the brush bristles-up in the glass, out of water that's been grey the same way for years, and your hand — his hand — lands on the edge of the sink, and that's the first thing that comes through: porcelain, cold, familiar as a handshake, and under it a whole life starts arriving sideways, the way a smell arrives before you know what it's attached to.

The t-shirt against your back is soft from four hundred washes and it gives you a Tuesday — him pulling it over his head in a dark bedroom at 5:40 in the morning, careful, because she's still asleep and the light switch is loud in this house if you let it be. The sweatpants at your ankles, waistband gone slack, give you winter, give you a couch, give you a Texans game with the sound low. The wedding band on the left hand — you feel it before you understand it, a weight that has been there so long it isn't a weight anymore — and that one comes in whole and warm: a courthouse, nineteen ninety-something, her laughing at something the clerk said, rain on a window that didn't matter at all.

There's a mop handle somewhere in him too, worn smooth where his palms always go, and it brings a school hallway at ten at night, fluorescent and empty and his, floor wax and the particular quiet of a building with nobody left in it but him and the hum of vending machines. He doesn't mind the quiet. He has made peace with the quiet a long time ago, found something almost holy in being the only one awake in a place built for noise. There's a son in there too — grown, calls on Sundays, a good kid who turned into a good man, and the pride of that sits in the chest like something load-bearing.

The body under all of it is honest in a way that surprises you: fifty-nine years old and it tells you so — low in the back from pushing a bucket for decades, a knee that announces weather before the weather arrives, and underneath the softness around the middle a strength that's still there in the forearms, in the shoulders, built by nothing more glamorous than years of wringing out mops and lifting trash bags that are heavier than they look. The dimples are there even now, even doing nothing, carved in by a lifetime of a face that defaults to pleasant. He goes to church most Sundays. He has a drink most nights, never two past two. He has never smoked, tried it once at nineteen and hated it. His fingers, when they're not doing anything, drum — on counters, on steering wheels, on the handle of a mop cart — and you feel that tic rise up in you now, unbidden, like a song you didn't know you knew the words to.

You shut off the tap. The silence afterward is enormous.

You lift your hands — his hands, broad and spotted faintly with age, the band catching the bathroom light — and turn them over like you've never seen the undersides of a pair of hands before, which, in the only way that matters, you haven't. You look up into the mirror, into blue eyes that aren't yours yet and might be yours for a long time or might be yours for only as long as it takes you to get bored, nobody knows, not even you.

"Well," you say, out loud, to the glass, in his voice, "that's new."