Dylan Ray Pruett

You are standing in Martin Kowalczyk's kitchen in Anchorage with a cold mug in his hand, and the window shows a flat white noon. You have been him for less than a minute. He had a good job and a quiet house, and a left knee that announced the stairs. None of that is the trouble. The trouble is that you checked the fridge, found his wife's handwriting on a note, and understood that a whole life was waiting for you to learn it, as if it were homework. You don't want to learn anyone. You want to be handed one. You put the mug down. The site is already open on his laptop, the wheel pale and patient, and you pay with his card.

Then the spin, and the kitchen goes out like a pulled plug.

Heat first. Steam on your face, foam on your jaw, a razor against the bone of it. You are leaning over a sink with your weight on a straight left arm, the porcelain cold under the heel of your hand. The window is full of white desert light. Your thumb and two fingers hold the razor, and they already know how. The blade lifts and goes on up the jaw, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth where somebody always stops, and you don't stop.

The first thing you learn is the shirt. It is soft with washing, the neck stretched, a band's name cracked across the chest. It was on the floor by the bed this morning, and he sniffed it, decided it was fine, and pulled it over his head. That memory is his and not yours: the small shame of it, and under that a laziness that felt like rest. Then the jeans, stiff at the knee with dried clay. He stepped into them one leg at a time, hopping, and swore at a belt loop. There was a trench and a mini excavator, the spoil heaped higher than his head, and a foreman named Chuy who called him *güero* and meant it kindly. He hates the dust. He is also proud of a straight wall of dirt.

The sink's edge is cold under your palm, and it hands you a different year. A turquoise house, a chain-link gate that sticks, and his mother's voice through a screen door. He was nineteen and sat in a pew with his shoulders pulled in, a clip-on tie, hymn numbers on a board. Nobody ever asked him to believe hard, so he never had to decide. The memory has a flat sweetness, like a church sandwich.

Then the razor handle, warm and slick. It gives you the blue. Last spring he sat on this tub's edge at midnight with a box of dye and gloves that didn't fit, and he was terrified, and his hands shook. Then he laughed at the mirror, a real laugh with nobody to hear it. He keeps the blue because it is the one decision that was entirely his. The little hoop in his left ear clicks against your jaw when you turn. You feel him chose that too.

Your body is a strange honest thing. It is soft over the belly and thin in the arms, and it is strong where the shovel lives: the forearms, the lower back, the grip. There is an ache across the shoulders like a hand pressing. The beard under the foam is patchy and grows where it wants, and you feel the bare places with the blade, small and stubborn. His knuckles itch to be cracked.

You rinse the razor and set it down. You press the thumb of one hand against the fingers of the other, and they pop, one, two, three, the old comfort. Then you turn the hand over under the bathroom light. Freckles run up the wrist. The nails are cracked at the edges, with clay in the lines.

You look up. Foam on half a face. Brown eyes, a freckled stranger who now belongs to you.

"Okay," you tell him. "Hello."

The mirror says nothing. You wonder, with the blade cooling on the sink, how long he will last, and when the wanting will come back for you.