Hector Ocampo

You are leaving Patrick Gallagher because of the quiet. It is the hour before the route. His kitchen smells of burnt coffee, and his back is already tight from a day he hasn't started. All morning you have been sitting in that kitchen with a sensible body and a full mug, and the mug is the problem. It is warm and it is enough. You can feel yourself starting to be fine, and you've learned what fine does to you. The wheel is already open on the table.

His thumb finds the button. You are gone before the coffee cools.

The razor moves.

You are bent over a small sink with one hand flat on the cold porcelain and the other dragging a blade up your jaw, against the grain, and the steam off the tap is still on your face. Half of it is foam. Half of it is already skin. You finish the second side fast and clean, straight past the corner of the mouth where something in this body expected to flinch, and it doesn't. The slippers are thin underfoot. The floor is cold through them. The radiator ticks. Behind the window frosted glass is going gray with a sky that hasn't decided anything.

Then the things start coming, one at a time, through whatever you are touching.

The porcelain first. It is rough at the lip where the glaze has gone, and under your palm you get a Sunday: a woman's laugh in the next room, a wrench in your hand that is not yet your wrench, a rented basement with an old sink you were told not to touch and took apart anyway, at nineteen, to see how it went back together. It went back together. The pride of that is warm and small, and it is his.

The shirt, then. The gray T-shirt is soft and thin at the collar, washed a hundred times, and it gives you the night before: pulling it from the hamper because the clean ones were all in the other apartment, hers, the girlfriend's, and you didn't want to ask. Both arms through the sleeves. A little embarrassed at being a man who keeps a drawer in somebody's place. Happy about it too, and embarrassed about that.

The sweatpants hang loose on the hip bones. They give you a different night, years back: an old girlfriend's hallway, a hand on a doorframe, not saying a thing that you should have said. It still aches like pressing a bruise. It is not yours, and you let it pass.

Your right arm has a weight to it. You turn the wrist under the light, and there it is, the little badly drawn thing inked on the forearm, crooked and unlovely. Your skin remembers the needle, a cheap shop, a friend laughing, a bad idea at twenty-two. A flush of regret rises that he has carried ten years, and it makes you almost laugh with him.

Your other hand has been clicking the pen on the shelf without being told. You hadn't noticed. Click, click. It is a habit from a thousand invoices written on the hoods of trucks. In the savings account there are a few tens of thousands he has been careful about, and the carefulness sits in your chest like a held breath. Thirty-two years sit in the knees, and the back is good, and the shoulders are strong from lifting cast iron under other people's sinks.

You set the razor down. You lift your hands in front of the mirror, turn them over, and look at them, and then you look up at the clean face.

"Morning," you say, in a voice that is still settling. It is not a question.

How long does this one last? It could be till lunch. The pen clicks once more in your fingers, and you let it.