Isaiah Marlowe

You are standing in a kitchen in High-desert Nevada, in the middle of the night, in a dead man's boots. He isn't dead, but the word keeps coming. Travis Keller's nose has been broken once and sits crooked on the cold air. His knees ache from a bronc that threw him in October. The whole house is asleep, a clock ticks on the stove, and you are twenty-nine and strong and bored down to the bone.

You have had him less than a minute. It isn't him you're tired of. It's that you filled a glass at the tap and held it, and the water tasted like water, and something in you said: more. You will not say that out loud, even here. You put the glass in the sink and open the page with the wheel on it.

The wheel turns. It clicks past names you'll never know.

Then there is warm light on tile, and a razor against your jaw. Your chin is slick with foam, and the blade has stopped. Your arm is already moving. It goes up the jaw against the grain and doesn't hesitate at the corner of the mouth, where some other man always did. The second half is done faster than the first. Then it's finished, and you're standing at a sink in the early morning with your breath going in and out of a big chest.

The sink edge is cold porcelain under your belly, and it gives you something. A small apartment, a girlfriend's voice through a wall, saying he'll cut himself rushing. He never rushes. He stops at the corner of the mouth because a razor once nicked him there on the morning of his father's funeral, and he has been careful of it ever since. You hear a church choir in his chest, though not a note of it is yours.

The plaid flannel hangs open over a white undershirt. The cuff scratches your wrist, and with it comes the morning he put it on, in the dark, one sleeve and then the other, so as not to wake the two kids. A daughter's cough came through the wall. He stood still until it stopped. The shirt smells faintly of floor wax and bleach. He cleans a school corridor when everyone has gone, and the keys on his belt loop know every door in it.

You wipe your face with the towel and your hand goes to your cheek by itself, patting it, checking. It is a habit older than you. Under the smooth skin there is a debt as heavy as a house: numbers, envelopes, the kitchen table at midnight. Another memory comes, of a woman he loved before. She laughed at something he said once, in a car, in the rain, and he still carries it around like a coin.

The body is large and tired and kind. Your back hurts where the sink digs in, and your feet are flat and heavy. You are forty-one.

You hold up your right hand. The black ink coils on the inner forearm, a pattern some younger man chose. You turn the hand over, and then you look up into the mirror at the brown eyes and the soft, clean jaw.

"Morning," you say. His voice is low and gravelly, and it feels like a borrowed coat.

You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting will come back by lunch.