Gerald Thibodeaux

Your knees hurt, and they are not your knees.

The groundskeeper you are wearing is six-five and has been a man for under a minute. Philadelphia is still dark in the window, the radiator ticking, a beard you have not yet learned to like hanging off his jaw. You are standing in his kitchen with your thumb on the page. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the shameful part. He has good shoulders, and the freckles keep surprising you in the glass. But a body that works is a hallway, and you have never wanted a hallway. You wanted a door. Somewhere in the 1463 times, the wanting stopped being about the men. It became the sound the wheel makes. You pay. You spin.

A sink, and a bald man leaning on it.

His weight arrives first, all in the left hand gripping porcelain, cold and slick. Then the razor against your jaw, stopped there, foam to the cheekbone on one side and nothing on the other. Your breath comes short and short. The window is full of white sun, the street outside steaming off last night's rain. You are 5'4" now, and the floor is much closer than it was a second ago.

The razor moves. Up the jaw, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth, where some other hand would have stopped and yours does not.

The sink rim is cold under your palm, and it gives you a bathroom in an old house, a wife standing in this doorway saying he is slow in the mornings, he always has been. Then the tile under your shoes, the cracked yellow floor, and a boy and a girl sitting on it on a Saturday, small, arguing over a toothbrush cup. His chest goes tight at that, a warmth and an ache together, and it is not yours, and it stays anyway.

The shirt on your back is soft, washed thin. It is a sleeping shirt he never put away. He pulled it over his head in the dark an hour ago, left arm first because the shoulder is stiff, and the cotton caught on the ear. Your jeans are stiff at the knee. He zipped them standing at the bed while the fan turned, and he was thinking about a patient's potassium and about nothing else.

Now the left arm, the portrait inked into the muscle. You do not look, but the skin remembers the needle on a Tuesday in his thirties, and a woman's face he asked for and wept at, and a quiet that went with it. Nobody knows what that face is. He never said.

Your fingers curl on their own, and the knuckles crack, one, two, three, a small habit he does when he is afraid and calls thinking. His ring finger is bare and pale. The thumb goes looking for a band and finds skin. The loss of it opens like a drawer. A church parking lot in July. A pew. A man who prayed in the car for her to come back, and never said so out loud.

The cheek where the mole sits is smooth now. The razor is cool in your fingers, plastic, light.

You turn your right hand over. Square palm, calluses at the base of the fingers, a nurse's hand that knows where a vein is. It is steady. You lift your eyes off it, into the glass, into his blue eyes, and half the beard is gone.

"Well," you say, and the voice is low and Louisiana, "let's see how long you last."

The foam on the left side is still wet, and you do not know whether you have an hour.