Marcus Adebayo

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Three minutes in Tyler Wysocki's body and already the boredom is a physical thing, sitting behind the beauty mark, under skin that's twenty years old and doesn't know yet what that's worth. You stand in his half-gutted kitchen — a rehab job, subway tile stacked in boxes, drywall dust in the light from the one window — and you feel his shoulder ache from framing all week, a hurt that will heal by Tuesday because he's twenty and everything heals by Tuesday. That's the trouble with him. He's a rental. Good hands, quick knees, a whole life still arriving, and none of it interesting yet, because nothing has had time to happen to him. You spun for damage last time and got a beauty mark and a punch list. You want something with weight already in it. You take out your phone, thumb already knowing the site before your eyes find it, and Tyler Wysocki — twenty, sore shoulder, three minutes old to himself in every way that matters — never even feels you go.

The wheel spins somewhere that isn't a place.

Foam, cold at the temple where the razor's already passed. Warm at the jaw where it hasn't. A hand — broader than the one you just left, knuckles thicker, a plain ring snug behind the second knuckle — brings the razor up against the grain in one motion with no hesitation at all, not even at the corner of the mouth, and the second half of the face comes clean faster than the first ever did. Fluorescent bulb humming behind a mirror clouded at the edges. A back that has opinions about being bent over a sink this long. This is the body: six feet, thirty-six years in it, average build carrying a low ache low in the spine that has just been standing there a while, patient, the kind of hurt that clocks in with you. Afro damp at the hairline from the shower before this. A pale scar through one eyebrow, right side, and you didn't put it there and you'll never know how it got there, not really — only that his hand doesn't flinch near it, which means whatever happened, it happened a long time ago and it stopped mattering.

The razor is what opens first. Ordinary drugstore thing, cartridge dulling, and his hand around it knows this exact motion the way it knows a lot of small motions nobody watches him do — a whole Sunday built out of them. Rinse. Tap the razor on the basin edge. Wipe. Somewhere in that rhythm a memory surfaces of buying razors two at a time because the co-op general store in the neighborhood keeps running low and he never remembers until he's standing at this sink with one going soft.

Then the shirt against your back gives up its morning. Gray cotton, thin from washing, and putting it on this morning had been unremarkable except that Danielle had been in the doorway with the baby on her hip, saying something about whether he'd be back before the yard got too cold to work bare-handed, and he'd said something back he can't now recall the words of, only the ease of it, the marriage-shorthand of two people who've stopped needing full sentences. The shirt remembers his arms going through the sleeves one at a time, right first, always right first, an old habit from some job or other. It remembers being pulled over a head that was already thinking about the bees.

The bees come in through the smell that's still faintly on him under the soap — smoke and wax, a note under everything now that never quite washes out. Saturday, not today: lids off, frames lifted, the deep patient hum of forty thousand of something that would kill you and mostly doesn't. His hands know that work the way they know the razor, a whole different fluency, gentler than you'd guess from the size of them. There's a boy — four now, walking, a menace with a stick — who is not allowed near the hives yet and hates it, and there's a photograph on the dresser of the boy asleep on Marcus's chest the week he was born, Marcus's face in it younger by four years and not yet carrying this particular tiredness under the eyes.

The floor tile under his bare feet is the cold of a Chicago apartment on a low heating bill, and the ache in his back is the ache of a man who bends over supers all day for a living and doesn't complain about it to anyone who could do anything about it. The scar over his eyebrow itches faintly the way old scars sometimes do for no reason anyone's found. Somewhere past the bathroom door, faint, the L train takes the curve two blocks over and the whole building answers it in a low shudder that he's stopped hearing as a sound and started feeling as just Sunday, just home.

You look down. The razor's still in his hand, foam gone, jaw clean, the ring catching the bathroom light.

You turn the hand over once, like it might explain itself.

"Huh," you say, to the mirror, to no one, in his voice, which is lower than the one you just gave up and doesn't yet know it's being spent.