Efraín Camacho

You are standing in Lamar Whitfield's kitchen in Dallas, late, with the refrigerator humming, and you are tired of his knees. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the knees. The bald scalp is cool under your palm. The scar through the eyebrow itches when you frown. He is a perfectly good body. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the part you would not say out loud. On the counter a phone lights up, and the name on it belongs to someone who would have called him back, and you do not want to be the one who has to decide. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are leaning over a sink.

Foam on half your face. The razor is stopped against the left jaw, and your arm is already moving, up and against the grain. It does not hesitate at the corner of the mouth. The second half goes faster than the first. Your belly presses the cabinet edge. Your left hand grips the counter. The window is blue, and a lamp glows in it.

The counter is cool under your palm, and it gives you a Saturday: a tape measure, a man on a ladder, and this hand holding the vanity level while someone else bolted it down. Pride, and a small ache that no one was there to see him do it.

The shirt against your back is soft from a thousand washes. This morning, in the dark, he pulled it over his head. He found the left sleeve first, the one that rides up over the tattoo. A swallow, or meant to be one, done by a friend in a garage when he was nineteen. He has hated it for forty years. He tugs the sleeve down every morning without thinking.

The razor handle is slick, and it gives you the corner of the mouth. A girl once laughed there, years back, when he nicked himself, and he has been careful ever since. Not careful with you. You went straight through it.

Your jaw is smooth now. Your jaw is bare. Your mouth still moves, chewing nothing. Gum, always gum, a habit that replaced the pipe for the minutes the pipe is not allowed. Somewhere in the tight, sweet drawer of his chest sits the smell of cherry tobacco, his father's, and a courtyard with dry palms, and the late sun on stucco.

Two children. Their names come in as a warm weight and no sound. A woman, recently gone. Her toothbrush is still in the cup, and he has not been able to throw it out.

Your left eye drifts outward, and you can feel it do it, a loose thread in the seeing.

You set the razor down. You turn your hands over under the light, thick and scarred at the knuckles, strange and entirely yours. Then you look up into the mirror and into whoever is looking.

"Well," you say, in a voice that rumbles lower than you expected. "Hello, Efraín."

The water runs. You do not know how long this one lasts.