Dylan Ferraro

Faisal Chowdhury has been standing at the flattop for eleven hours, and the burn on his forearm from the splash-back at 4 PM has already blistered under the cheap gauze somebody dug out of the first-aid kit nobody restocks. His feet ache in the same rubber-soled shoes as yesterday. Marisol at the register asked him again tonight if he was okay, in that flat voice that means she has stopped expecting an answer that isn't fine. He said fine. He has said fine in this body for forty-one seconds and it is already too small, too sore, too Ohio, too Tuesday-that-is-actually-Monday. He is not thinking about Faisal's mortgage or Faisal's mother's calls he does not return. He is thinking about the wheel. He is thinking, the way he thinks every few weeks now, that there is a version of tonight where he is not this. He locks the back door of the kitchen, sits down in his car in the lot, and opens the site on his phone before the engine even turns over. He does not let himself decide. He just spins.

You come up through cold porcelain and a foam smell and a fluorescent buzz behind your eyes, and your hand is already moving — dragging a razor up along a jaw with no hitch at all where a hitch should be, where some old habit of stopping and checking is supposed to live and does not, not this time. The water in the sink runs rust-colored copper light off the fixture. A shower curtain sags on its rod in the mirror's corner. Your chest goes tight and small and quick in a way Faisal's never did — a rib cage built narrower, a breath that catches on nothing, asthma sitting in it like a held note. You finish the second side of your face before you have thought a single thought as anyone.

Then the sink rim comes alive in your palms first — cool, chipped enamel, the tap handle worn down to bare metal in the middle from a thousand mornings just like this one, and under it a whole apartment arrives at once, small and rented and his: the shower that only runs hot for six minutes, the window unit that rattles, the framed print of his mother's church a county over that he never got around to hanging straight. The razor itself gives you Colgate and drugstore Gillette and, further back, his father's hand steadying a much younger jaw at a different mirror, teaching him the grain of it, laughing kindly at how careful he was — that carefulness is the thing that is missing now and you don't know why, and it aches faintly like a tooth.

The t-shirt against your back gives you more: gray cotton, soft from washing, and under it the memory of the uniform shirt it will become in an hour — chambray blue, breast pocket, the mailbag strap that always finds the same groove worn into his shoulder no matter which side he slings it. Six years of walking the same nine miles of Nashville sidewalk arrive together — dogs that know him by scent before sight, a Cassidy Lane widow who saves him lemonade in July, the particular ache in his knees on concrete versus the relief of grass verges, the way people say oh, wow at him for one startled second before they remember he's just the mail. His skin remembers sunscreen applied at 6 AM out of grim habit and applied again by two, remembers gloves in a Tennessee July because the sun does something to him no one else on the route worries about. His girlfriend, Renata, is in there too — her laugh through his phone last night, her fingers tracing the back of his pale wrist like she's checking something is real, the mass at St. Ann's they go to some Sundays and skip others, guiltily, together. None of it belongs to an ex; there was never anyone before her worth keeping.

Your lungs know, before you do, the particular tightness that means the inhaler is on the nightstand and not in your pocket yet, and that this is a thing to remember before the door, always before the door.

You look down at your hands — pale past pale, blue-veined, foam still drying in a smear along one knuckle — and you turn the razor over once like you're checking it's real, the way she checks his wrist.

"Huh," you say, to no one, to the mirror, to whichever one of you is left in it. "Two hundred and thirty-five."

Then you set the razor down on the edge of the sink, gently, the way a man does who has all the time in the world, and you don't know yet if that's true.