Emiliano Cruz

Marco's hands smell like green soap and cold coffee, and they are not steady the way they were an hour ago. The client left before the outline was even half done — some argument about the price, about the reference photo, about nothing — and Marco sat alone in the shop after locking up, running his thumb over the tattoo machine like it owed him something. Twenty-seven years old, freckled, dark hair getting long over his ears, and a life he has been wearing for what feels like no time at all and also forever. He is good at this body. He knows the weight of it, the exact give of the chair under it, the way his back complains when he leans over a stencil too long. But tonight the shop feels small the way it always eventually feels small, and his phone is face-down on the counter because there's a message on it he doesn't want to read again, and the wheel is open in the other tab, patient, glowing, asking nothing of him but money. He has been Marco less than a day. That is not the same as being done with him. It has never been about being done. He spins because the wanting comes back the way weather comes back, and there is no forecasting it, only the sky going dark again. He pays. He spins. He does not say goodbye to the shop, because he never does.

The sink is cold under his palm and then it isn't his palm, it's someone else's, shorter fingers, a callus riding the base of the thumb that Marco's hand never had. The razor is already moving. It goes up the jaw against the grain, smooth, unbothered, past the corner of the mouth without the little stutter that should be there — some rhythm interrupted and immediately resumed by different muscle memory wearing the same arm. Steam sits in the room. A single bulb over the mirror throws everything gold and close. Half a face in foam, half a face clean, and the clean half is already someone else looking back at itself without knowing it.

The shirt comes first — not worn yet, just remembered, hanging off the doorknob two feet away, and the memory arrives anyway because the body knows where its own clothes live even with its back turned to them: a chambray shirt gone soft at the elbows, grass-stained at the cuff no matter how many times it's washed, put on this morning — no, not this morning, some morning, all mornings — sleeve first over the right arm because the right shoulder aches faintly from a mower that fights the same rut in the outfield turf every single day. Emiliano. The name comes up out of the shirt like a smell. Twenty-four years old and the shoulder already knows something the rest of him pretends not to. Under the t-shirt, muscle that isn't much to look at but is honest — forearms that can push a walk-behind mower in dead straight lines for six hours, hands that seat sprinkler heads without looking, a lower back that has opinions by three o'clock every day of his life. Calluses on both palms, thick and even, no rings, no ink, nothing to mark him except the one thing everyone notices in the first two seconds of meeting him, the cleft cut deep enough into his chin that little kids at the ballfield ask him if he got hit with something.

The bathwater-warm memory of Sunday: infield dirt under his boots, the mower's stripes laid down so straight the groundskeeper before him used to call it praying, and Rosa waiting by the dugout fence in sunglasses too big for her face, laughing at something he said that wasn't even funny, just laughing because it was five o'clock and the light was doing that thing it does over the outfield grass in June. Rosa, who brings him horchata in a thermos because she knows he never remembers to drink water. And under that, further down, another year, another face — Camila, who left in March, whose voice still surfaces sometimes in the ordinary middle of a task, weeding a baseline, replacing a bulb in the scoreboard, no reason, just there and then gone, the way exes are, unfinished business nobody chose to leave unfinished. He does not miss her exactly. He misses being someone she thought was going somewhere.

Mass on Sundays when his mother makes him, which is most Sundays. A beer or two most nights on the apartment courtyard steps, dry palms clicking overhead in whatever wind comes down from the hills, neighbors' televisions leaking through open windows. He has never smoked, tried it once at nineteen and hated the taste enough to never try again. He does not carry debt he thinks about, or a secret he tells anyone, or an ambition bigger than doing the outfield right and getting home before the foam dries into the towel by the sink — this towel, the one his hip is almost touching, threadbare at the corner where he always dries his hands first.

The razor finishes its stroke at the jaw. Water runs. Somewhere down the hall a clock he doesn't recognize yet is keeping the middle of a Monday, a whole ocean of hours between here and wherever Marco's shop went dark and quiet.

You look down. The hand holding the razor is smaller than the one you had this morning, browned by outdoor light, the nails cut close and practical, and you turn it over slow in the bathroom's gold bulb-light like you're checking it for a flaw the mirror hasn't shown you yet.

"Huh," you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't Marco's and isn't yours either — his, now, however briefly that turns out to be.