Efrén Dominguez

You are standing in a bathroom in Chicago, in a man who sold insurance, and the razor is already in your hand. Adrián Lozano's jaw is half-shaved, blond stubble in a clean stripe. You have been him for less than a minute. Nothing is wrong with him. He is fit, he is thirty-five, the mirror likes him. But the bar of light on the tile is the same bar of light every morning, and you can feel the shape of the day he owns: the train, the desk, the calls. You came to be someone and you are being someone's Thursday. You rinse the blade. You do not say the other reason aloud, not even in his head, the one about how his hands felt wrong holding a thing you wanted to hold. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

The engine drops a note and catches.

You are halfway down a lawn, both hands on the bar, and the machine shudders up through your wrists. Grass is wet on your shins. One earmuff has slid off your left ear and the world pours in: the engine, a dog two yards over, a truck downshifting at the one stoplight. Your breath is slow. The air is cool and green, the sun only just over the fence line.

You reach up and put the earmuff back. It feels like something you have done ten thousand times, and so you do it unhurried.

Then the bar. Rubber grip gone smooth, the left one wrapped in tape, and through your palms comes a Saturday: a father's hand over his, a smaller hand on this same bar, the lesson that you steer by looking at the far fence, never at the wheels. Straight rows are a kind of decency. He has been mowing straight since he was eleven. Beside you lie the crooked rows he cut earlier, wandering, and the shame of them is his, a week of not looking at anything far away.

The sweatshirt is heavy with dew at the cuffs. It gives you the morning: standing in a kitchen, laptop glowing with listings he had read twice, pulling the gray sweatshirt over his head because the good shirts are for interviews and there have been none. The jeans next, stiff at the knee, the left leg first, as always. Belt notched at the worn hole. Socks, one thin at the heel. He sat on the chair to lace the boots and stayed sitting a minute longer than he needed to, vape in his fist, the sweet chemical cloud, thinking of the plant closing, eleven years on a line, the envelope and the handshake. The vape is in the sweatshirt pocket now. You can feel its small weight against your hip.

His body: five-eight, solid, thirty-seven years in the lower back, a dull ache at the base of the spine when you lean into the push. Calves strong. Knees complaining. Calluses across the heel of each palm. Something rubs at the inside of his right ring finger, and your thumb goes there without being told, turning at nothing. A ring was there once, or one he carries and turns in his pocket. In the pocket there is only the habit. A church bell memory comes with it, his mother's pew, the smell of wax, and the quiet ten dollars in savings he thinks of as nothing and is something. Two beers last night, the second one alone on the porch, the closed diner across the street dark as a pulled tooth.

Your tongue finds the moustache. Your eyebrow itches where the scar splits it, and nothing in you knows how he got it. That memory stays shut.

You lift your hands off the bar. The engine idles and the mower trembles. They are broad, brown, grass-flecked, and not yours, and you turn them over once, slowly.

Then you look up, past the fence, at nothing.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."

The mower hums, waiting for you to push, and somewhere inside you the wheel is already quietly asking.