Marco Villareal

—

Terrance Boykins has been you for forty seconds, and already the cab smells wrong. Diesel and pine tree air freshener, a thermos of coffee gone lukewarm in the cupholder, San Francisco fog sitting gray on the windshield like it's got nowhere better to be. Twenty-two, athletic, freckles across the bridge of a nose that isn't yours and never was. You feel the ache behind his eyes from a double shift, feel the itch of a body that wants to be driving and is instead parked at a rest stop scrolling a phone with a cracked screen. It's the middle of the morning here. He had big plans for this body — a body that runs, that lifts, that has forty more years in it than most of what the wheel gives you. And that's exactly the problem. You've had strong before. You've had young before. Forty seconds in and the wanting is already back, the old familiar itch, because strong and young were never the point. The point is the never knowing. You open the site on his cracked phone with his thick fingers, and something in you that isn't him leans forward.

You spin.

—

The razor is already moving before you catch up to it, up along the jaw, against the grain, no hesitation where a hesitation should be. Foam giving way to clean skin in one motion, faster on this second half than the first ever was. You are bent over a sink that is not yours, small in a body that is smaller than the one you just left, compact and warm and smelling of drugstore shaving cream and something floral underneath — fabric softener, maybe, coming off the collar of a t-shirt against your neck. Green eyes in the mirror. Not your green eyes. His. The water is running. Somewhere above the sink, a bulb throws yellow light across half a foamed face and half a clean one, and for one second there is no one behind those eyes at all.

Then there is you.

The razor lands in the sink, and your — his — hand grips the edge of the porcelain, and the rest of him arrives all at once, in pieces, through everything he's touching.

The sink first: cold under his palm, chipped at the edge where he set something down too hard once, years ago, moving in. This apartment. Brooklyn. Third floor, a stoop out front that catches sodium light at night and turns the wet stone the color of a bruise. He loves that stoop. He and Ines sat out there the night they signed the lease, split a six-dollar bottle of wine straight from the bag because they hadn't unpacked glasses yet.

The sweatpants against his legs, worn soft at the knee — Sunday clothes, house clothes, a small mercy of a day off, except it isn't a day off, not really, because his manager texted last night about a client call that got moved and he's supposed to be dressed and useful in twenty minutes, foam or no foam. That's the shape of his anxiety, the low hum of it under everything: the meds in the cabinet behind the mirror, small and orange and unremarkable now, the fourth year of taking them, the difference between this version of him and the one before the difference was made.

The t-shirt, thin cotton, worn from washing — and through it, a whole morning: getting up before the kids so there'd be a minute of quiet, coffee poured and going cold exactly like Terrance's had, some habits apparently following a man wherever he's poured, sleeve pulled over one arm and then the other while Ines slept crossways in the bed the way she does, taking up more room than a person her size should be able to. He'd stood in the doorway of the smaller bedroom for a second, watched his daughter's foot hanging off the edge of the toddler bed, his son curled the opposite way in the crib like they'd argued about which direction was correct and split the difference by disagreeing anyway.

The wedding band, plain, on the left hand gripping the sink — and that opens the widest door of all: the church upstate, Ines in her mother's dress taken in at the waist, his own hands shaking so bad putting the ring on her that the priest had laughed, actually laughed, a good laugh, and everyone in the pews had laughed with him, and it had not felt like an embarrassment, it had felt like being known.

Under all of it, the body itself reports in, plain and unhidden: five-three and never going to be more, a frame that filled out steady in his twenties without ever getting broad, hands too small for a man's hands, according to exactly one girl in high school who is a joke he still tells. A little stiffness low in the back from the desk, from the two monitors and the fluorescent hum that is Monday through Friday, that is right now technically, that is the job he is, this second, supposed to be dressing for. Nothing hurts that matters. Nothing about him asks to be noticed. That absence is its own kind of fact — a man built for nobody to point at him on the subway, and he has never once resented that, has in fact been grateful for it, the whole soft anonymous shape of his own life.

The rosary is not in reach but the memory of one is, hanging off the rearview of his father's old car, decades gone — Sunday Mass, his mother's elbow correcting his posture in the pew, a faith he doesn't perform loudly but hasn't set down either, still there Sundays when the kids are dressed in time.

The razor, cooling in the sink where he — where you — set it down: one motion left, that's all there ever was, half a face still slicked with foam that got left behind when the hand kept moving, moving faster than it should because whatever was steering it in that last half-second wasn't thinking about the corner of the mouth the way he always, always does.

—

You lift your — his — left hand out of the water and look at it. Small, the ring catching the bathroom light, a thin white line of foam still clinging to one knuckle. You turn it over once, like it might answer something, then you don't look at it anymore.

You look up into the mirror instead.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice pitched higher and lighter than you've spoken in for three hundred and thirty-six men now, "let's finish this."

You reach for the razor.

—