Marcus Tillery

The knee is what does it. You're sitting in Colby Rhoades's locker after practice, thirty-five minutes into being twenty-one years old, and the trainer's already gone, and you bend to pull the tape off and something in the joint clicks in a way that has nothing wrong with it at all — that's the thing, it's fine, it's a young knee, it's a rich man's knee, and you hate it for a second so purely it surprises you. Thirty-five minutes of hazel eyes and a signing bonus and legs that don't ask permission, and you're already bored the way you get bored of a hotel room. You didn't come here to keep something. You came here to spend it. You open the site on the phone that isn't yours, the wheel already loaded from before, and you spin because spinning is the whole appetite, because somewhere out there right now it is also evening, always evening somewhere, and some other man is mid-gesture in his own unremarkable life, and you would rather be surprised by him than comfortable in this one a minute longer.

The razor is already moving when you land. Up the jaw, against the grain, and the hand doing it does not hesitate where — you'll learn in a second — it always hesitates, right at the corner of the mouth, out of some old carefulness that isn't yours to have. Foam on half a face in a mirror lit by one bulb. Steam still coming off the water in the sink. You're bent over it, weight on a forearm gone solid with ink, and the whole right side of you is complaining in a low, permanent way that has nothing to do with the last ten seconds and everything to do with years you haven't lived yet, in a back you didn't earn and can already feel deciding things for you.

The razor's handle is the first thing that talks. Cheap, ridged plastic, a drugstore razor, and it comes with a Tuesday — some Tuesday, could be any of five hundred — standing in this exact light, foam gone cold on his jaw because the radio on the dresser called his number and he'd forgotten his own face was half done. Comes with the habit itself: always right side first, always slower there, some old superstition about the corner of the mouth he got from his daddy, who cut himself bad there once and told the story so many times it turned into procedure. You finish the second half faster because you don't have the superstition. You only have the memory of it, arriving a half-second behind your own hand.

The shirt gives you more, once you think to notice it's hanging on the door, not on you yet — navy, the collar gone soft at the point, and just the sight of it on its hanger brings the whole morning routine back sleeve-first: the way the left shoulder seam always sat wrong from the time he took a man down hard in a parking lot on Fourth and it never quite fixed right, the mic clip that pinches if you don't seat it exactly, the belt that is heavier than any belt has business being, that he stopped noticing thirty years ago and back-pain reminds him of at the end of every shift. Your knees remember standing at a car window in July heat. Your back remembers the last twelve years of leaning into it wrong to save the knees. Nothing about this body was given to you finished — it was given to you paid for, one bad decision and one good save at a time.

The sink under your hands is the deep one. Marriage rises out of the porcelain like something released — not this house, an older one, a woman's laugh from another room, a fight about money that happened more than once because you were always deep in it, cards and a truck note and a kid's braces, thirty, forty, once nearly ninety thousand dollars of hole that never quite closed no matter what shift you picked up. She left, eventually, not because of the money exactly, and there is a particular grief that lives only in your chest now, walled off and specific, that isn't about her leaving so much as about her being the one who got away clean while you're still in here climbing. Two kids come with that same grief, warmer, a birthday cake, a graduation you cried at without deciding to. And underneath the marriage, the current woman — the one whose robe is on the other hook, whose toothbrush is the second one in the cup — steadier, no less real for coming second, a hand on your back at the end of a bad shift that this same back has been grateful for more times than you'd say out loud.

Your own mouth tastes faintly of mint and something under it, whiskey from last night, one glass, maybe two, habit not indulgence. Your teeth find the edge of a thumbnail before you've decided to bite it — old habit, worn smooth into muscle, gone before you notice you did it. Forty-five years old in the knees, the lower back, the left shoulder, and none of it screaming, all of it present, a low tax paid daily. Gray in the hair you can't see from here but feel in the weight of it, grown out full, unhidden. A body that has been hit and has hit back and mostly, at the end of most days, just stood in a lot leaning on a car watching the light go copper over an asphalt lot, waiting for a radio to say something worth standing up straight for.

You set the razor down. You look at the hand that held it — nails bitten close, a tremor settling out of it, ink climbing the forearm in bold outdated color, an eagle, something faded past reading. You turn it over once like you're checking it's real, because thirty-five minutes ago it belonged to a boy with a signing bonus and now it belongs to a man who is upside down on a mortgage in a city he has protected for two decades without ever quite getting ahead of it, and something about that trade sits strange and good in your chest at the same time.

"Well," you say to the mirror, to the half-shaved face looking back at you, "let's see what you're carrying."