Marcus Deloit

The mirror in the back room won't quit showing you Efrén's face — the lazy eye drifting off to the left like it's looking for an exit, the silver stubble, the soft gut under the apron. Sixty-two years of somebody else's life, and you inherited it forty seconds ago, mid-sweep, a broom in his hand and a client's hair already settling into the grout lines of the floor. You feel his knees complain when you shift your weight. You feel how tired he is in a way that has nothing to do with today.

That's the thing. It's Friday, end of shift, Vegas light going orange through the shop window, and this body wants to sit down and eat something soft and watch television until it forgets itself. That want isn't yours. It never is, at the start. But it curdles fast when it's not.

You set the broom against the wall. You don't finish the sweep.

The site loads on the shop's cracked tablet, propped by the register where Efrén keeps his appointment book. The wheel again. You didn't come back for a reason you'd say out loud — boredom's too clean a word, and it isn't quite that either. It's that you swept this same floor yesterday, and the day before, and the eye in the mirror kept drifting, and somewhere around spin four hundred you stopped pretending you were looking for a home. You spin because the wheel is still spinning. You pay. You watch the light chase itself around, and it lands, and Efrén Guzmán's hand — thick fingers, a class ring worn thin — presses the button one last time.

—

The thumb moves before you do. That's the first thing: it's already faster than the man was, flicking through a video feed too quick to actually see any of it, like it knows exactly what it's doing and doesn't need him for it anymore. The screen throws blue light up across a jaw you don't own yet, a cheekbone, and behind your eyes something has simply stopped blinking on the old schedule and started on a new one, calmer, more even. You're lying on your side in the dark. There's a weight to the room — a couch, not a bed, cushions gone soft in a shape that isn't yours, a blanket half kicked to the floor. Somewhere off to the side a television throws orange fire-light across a wall with nobody watching it. It's late here. Late enough that a grown man alone with his phone is not unusual, it's just Friday, it's just the end of something, and you are, for one full second, only weight and breath and the phone's warmth against your palm before anything else comes.

—

The shirt is what starts it — plain black cotton, worn soft at the collar, and putting it on this morning comes back to you in his hands, not yours: the smell of the dryer sheet, the little tug of static, the reach up and over that pulls at a shoulder that's stronger than it has any right to be for someone who spends this many hours on a couch. Muscle memory older than tonight's sadness. You feel, distantly and completely, twenty-four years of a body that was built to be looked at — the gym at six a.m. before call time, the trainer's voice, the mirror at the studio today, a rack of clothes with his name taped to a hanger, someone adjusting his collar with two fingers and stepping back to check the light. That happened today. Hours ago, in daylight, on a set with a paper backdrop and a space heater aimed at his bare arms between takes, someone saying good, good, chin down, and him doing it without having to think, because his face has always known what to do even when the rest of him didn't.

The tattoos come up warm under your own touch when you shift your arm across your chest — the eagle, the dagger through the rose, the pin-up girl on the inside of the other forearm, each one a different afternoon in a different chair, a friend laughing next to him, cheap and important. A promise to himself at nineteen that he'd have something permanent since so little else was.

The couch under your back gives you the apartment: the unwashed dishes he stopped apologizing for, the second bedroom he doesn't use for anything, the ring light in the corner still plugged in from a self-tape he sent in on spec and didn't hear back about. The rent that's later every month than the month before. Numbers that don't add up no matter which way he turns them, cards maxed against a face that still books work, an agent who says he's "having a moment" like that pays anything down.

And her — she comes in sideways, through the smell of the blanket, a perfume that isn't there anymore but the memory insists on anyway. Not long gone. Long enough that the couch still remembers two people on it and now only holds one. He hasn't told anyone how much that's the reason he's up at this hour with the TV on for company and the sound off, thumb going through other people's lives so his own stops being so loud.

Underneath all of it, quieter, older: a small apartment on the west side, a mother reading scripture out loud on Sunday mornings whether anyone was listening or not, the particular stillness of a chapel he doesn't go to as often as he tells her he does. A prescription bottle in the bathroom he's careful about, that helps, that he's not ashamed of exactly, just private. Hands that go to his own cuticles without his permission, picking at the edge of a thumbnail right now, an old habit older than the ex, older than the debt, older than any of it — something his hands do when the rest of him has gone somewhere else.

He was twenty-four and tired and okay, mostly, in the specific and fragile way of somebody keeping a lot of plates spinning at once. He did not see this coming, because there was nothing to see.

—

You bring the phone down from your face slowly, and turn your hand over instead, palm up, in the blue light. Somebody else's cuticles, picked ragged at the edges. Somebody else's ink catching the TV glow. You flex the fingers once, testing them like new gloves.

Then you look up into the dark where the phone's camera would be, if it were pointed at you, and you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't finished being yours yet:

"Guess I'm not done yet."