Marcus Dillard

You are in Jesse Harlan's kitchen, in the gray before Dallas wakes, and the tape measure is still around your neck. You have been him for less than a minute. Dimples, a shaved scalp, a tailor's callus on the middle finger. You press the callus against the counter and wait to feel something. A man who sews hems for a living ought to be worth keeping. He isn't. He is quiet and he fits, and it is nothing to you.

Fitting is the trouble. Fifteen hundred and forty-one times you have gone into a stranger, and the strangers have only ever been quiet and fitting. So the phone is already in your hand. The wheel is already turning, and the light of it is on Jesse's face.

It lands. There is a sink under your ribs, cold porcelain against both palms, and foam drying tight on half your jaw. The razor is stopped against the bone of your jaw. The cool air tastes of menthol and old pipes. It is the middle of the morning here, wrong for shaving, so you think: night shift, or a man owed a late start.

Your thumb moves on the razor handle and the plastic gives you a flash, not yours. A drugstore aisle, a coupon, his wife saying the good ones cost too much. Money sits in him like a stone. Debt, the house worth less than the loan, a number he reads at night. Underwater. It is his feeling, a low hum under the ribs.

The gray T-shirt is soft at the collar. A morning comes up through the cotton. He pulls it from the drawer in the dark so as not to wake her. The left sleeve first, the ring catching the hem. Then a prayer, short and unembarrassed, over the bed's edge, before the coffee. The faith is real in him. It warms like a hand on the back of the neck.

The tile is cold under bare feet. Under the cold, the stairs. Public concrete steps between backyards, wet leaves slick on them, late light, his boots on them every evening, and the click of his knee on the descent. A girl who used to wait at the bottom, years ago, before his wife. The old ex. Not love now, just a place the feeling still lives, and it flinches at the memory.

The ring is gold-plain and warm from the water. Under it the finger is faintly worn. You turn it. Marriage comes in a rush: her laugh in a kitchen, a fight about the car, her forehead against his collarbone. It is the best thing in him. You are holding it like a coin you did not earn.

The body is twenty-six and strong. The shoulders ache from the cruiser seat, the calves are tight, the lungs want the vape sitting on the sill. The hands know the angle already. They want to finish.

So the razor goes up the jaw, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth where he always hesitated. You don't. The second half is quick.

You rinse the blade. You look at the hand, at the ring, the freckled knuckles, turn it over, and lift your eyes to the mirror.

"Morning, Marcus," you say, trying how it sits in the mouth.

Somewhere under the sink's hum the wanting is already a small quiet thing, waiting to see how long.