Marco Villanueva

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Vinod's hand won't stop shaking. Not from age — from wanting. You've had this body thirteen minutes, decided within the first three that you were done with it, and spent the other ten pretending otherwise, sitting on the edge of a bed that isn't yours in a house that isn't yours, in a Houston so quiet you can hear the AC cycling. Sixty-two years old, heavy through the middle, gray hair gone thin at the crown. The wedding ring — his, not yours, never yours — sits loose enough to spin on the finger. You spent your thirteen minutes learning nothing about him except that his knees hurt going down stairs and his mouth already tastes like his own bad coffee habit. That's the whole complaint. Not cruelty. Just a body already stale before you've finished putting it on. You open the laptop instead of thinking about why that's true. The wheel is already loaded, the tab still open from last time, like it knew.

You spin.

—

The razor is already moving before you catch up to it, up along the jaw against the grain, sure and unhesitating, and only after does the rest of you arrive — the foam smell, the drip of the tap, the particular ache low in the shoulders that says this body has already put in a long day of lifting something heavier than itself. Your reflection finishes the stroke your hand didn't ask permission for. Half his face bare now, the other half still foam, and the eyes in the mirror are brown, not yours, younger than the ones you left behind on a bed in Houston. A cross and praying hands sit inked into the forearm holding the razor. There's a scar through one eyebrow, pale, old. You know before you know anything else that this is not your face and that you are standing in a bathroom with rust threading down through old pipes.

The tile is cold under bare feet. That's the first true thing his body gives you, before memory, before name — cold tile, warm water still running, three a.m. quiet with the particular texture of a city that never fully sleeps but is, right now, close to it.

Then the razor's handle, worn smooth in one spot where a thumb has pressed a thousand mornings — and there it is. Marco. The name arrives like a exhale, not announced but simply known, the way your own name never needs telling. Marco Villanueva. Thirty-six hours off shift last week, forty this week, the schedule always sideways to the sun, which is why three in the morning finds him upright and lathered instead of asleep like the rest of the street. Firehouse on Magazine. The apron out front where they took his photo, engine gleaming red behind him, someone from the Times-Picayune wanting "day in the life of," and he'd stood there with his arms crossed feeling like an idiot, feeling proud anyway.

The shirt against your back — his shirt, black, thin from washing — gives up the morning he first put it on, three years back, a gift from Elena because she said all his others had holes at the collar. Elena. The wife. Her name comes with weight, with the specific tired fondness of fifteen years, with the smell of her shampoo on a pillow and an argument they had in this exact bathroom about money that ended in her laughing before it ended in anything worse. A boy's height chart penciled on a door frame somewhere past this room — his son, seven years old, missing a front tooth in the last photo taken on this counter, toothpaste tube still capped wrong the way the kid always leaves it. Colgate, red and white, sitting there now.

The wedding band is tight where Vinod's was loose — Marco's hand is thicker, works for a living, has for twenty years. Your palm remembers, before you tell it to, the shape of an axe haft and the particular give of a door about to come off its hinges. Calluses along the base of the fingers. A dead man's weight once, carried down two flights, a call that still visits some nights uninvited — that's the thing nobody at the station knows he still turns over, four years on, quiet, alone, no confession because there's nowhere in him built for one. No God in this one. Just the weight, revisited, put down again.

There was a woman before Elena — Dana, a name that comes up soft and unbothered, an old thing fully closed, no ache left in it, just a photograph he doesn't keep anymore and doesn't need to. That door shut clean, which is rarer than it sounds.

The muscle under this skin is real work, not gym-built — thick through the forearms, compact, the 5'6" frame carrying more than its share without complaint. Something in the lower back twinges when you shift weight off the sink edge, an old lift gone wrong, manageable, ignorable, his. The mouth wants a vape pen that isn't in reach. The nails on this hand are bitten to the quick, an old habit that survived quitting the whiskey years back — that came back to you already, unbidden, the moment your teeth found the edge of a thumbnail without being told to.

You finish the last corner of foam. The face in the mirror is whole now, and it is the best-looking thing you've worn in months, and some old greedy math in you is already running: this one is worth keeping around a while.

You look down at the hand holding the razor, turn it slow, watch the tattoo catch the bathroom light.

"There you are," you say to the mirror, and you don't know yet if you mean him or you.