Marco Ibañez

The line at Delgado's is dead by ten, and Vikram's knees ache the way they always ache — cartilage worn soft from fifteen years of standing on rubber mats over a flat-top, and it is his knees tonight, not the wanting, that push you back to the site. You are sitting in the break room in his body, phone brightness low, thumb hovering, and you tell yourself it's just to look. The apron still smells like char and garlic. Fifty-seven years old and every joint in him complains, and you think: not tired of him, exactly. Tired of the ache being the first thing you feel every morning. You have spun seventy times chasing something you don't say out loud even to yourself, and tonight it isn't greed and it isn't boredom, it's simpler and worse — you just want, for one evening, to not hurt. You open the page. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything.

The razor is halfway up a jaw that isn't yours yet, and then it is. You feel the drag of the blade before you feel anything else — steel against grain, foam gone thin and cool along one cheek, the other half still lathered white. Your hand — his hand — doesn't stop moving. It finishes the stroke at the corner of the mouth without hesitating, the way it apparently always hesitates there, and you feel that as a small wrongness even before you have a name for what's wrong. You are shorter now, and dense with muscle in a way the last body never was, weight sitting low and centered, knees that don't ache at all. Fluorescent light over a mirror. Your own three reflections in three mirrors, tiled bathroom, a tank top, jeans loose at the hip, a wedding band cold against your finger where the razor's handle presses it.

It comes in through the razor first — his father's razor, or the habit of one, something passed down that isn't yours to know outright, only to feel: patience, the specific care of a man who was taught that rushing a blade is how you bleed. Then the tank top against your back gives you the rest of this morning, sleeve by sleeve, except it wasn't sleeves, it was pulling it on over his head standing in the dark so he wouldn't wake her, four-fifteen and the alarm not due for ten more minutes, because show time is 0530 and there's a wife in that bed named Dana who sleeps through his alarm every single day and has never once complained about the ones she doesn't sleep through. The jeans know the drive to the field — gravel road, wheat stubble cut low and gold-gray on both sides, a thunderhead stacked up black in the west the way it's been all week, light gone the color of a bruise before rain. He flew a King Air out of a strip forty minutes from here for six years before the charter outfit put him in the left seat of something bigger, and his hands on the wheel of his truck know that road with the lights off.

The ring is the loudest thing. It comes back not as a memory but as a habit, a thing his fingers do without him — turning it, turning it, on long legs of a flight when the autopilot's got it and there's nothing to do but watch cloud go by underneath. Dana slid it on eight years ago in a backyard in Garden City with her sister crying into a paper plate of cake, and he has never once taken it off, not for preflight, not for the gym, not for anything, and somewhere in there is the ex — Renata, a name that surfaces with no weight attached to it anymore, a college thing, kind but wrong, the kind of ex you think of only because a song comes on, nothing that costs him anything to remember. What costs him something is smaller: the second his nose remembers being broken, a rec-league basketball elbow eleven years back, the crunch of it, the way it never quite sat straight again and he stopped minding within a season. What costs him something is standing in this exact bathroom last winter on hold with his mother for forty minutes about his father's heart, phone on speaker on the counter, foam drying on his face because he forgot to rinse, and nobody has to know that. You get his body's plain competence, too — the flat-top calm of a man who trusts checklists, forearms that know the weight of a yoke and a co-pilot's coffee cup both, five-five and built like something that was made to be strong in a small space, which a cockpit is.

You look down. The razor's still in your hand, foam drying at the wrist, and you turn it over once like you're checking it's real, then look at the ring instead, turning it with your thumb the way his fingers already know to do without you telling them. Outside the little window over the towel bar the sky has gone that pre-storm yellow, cut stubble running flat to the edge of it. You lean toward the mirror, meet hazel eyes that used to be brown an hour and one body ago, and you say, to nobody, to Dana who isn't in the room, to the next spin that hasn't happened yet and might not for a long time —

"Half a face. Might as well finish."