Mark Holicek

The evening is nothing much. That's the honest word for it — nothing much, the kind of Friday where the light goes and you don't notice until the room is blue and the phone is still in your hand. You have scrolled past everything twice. You have thought, the way you always think, about waking up as somebody else. Not death, not fantasy, just the plain mechanical wanting of it: to stand in another set of legs, to feel a stranger's tiredness in your own chest. You have wanted this for years the way some people want a country they've never been to. Tonight there's a site. vessel.cards. A wheel on a page, spinning slow under your cursor like it's stalling for effect. You didn't think it would work. You paid anyway.

You spin.

There is no feeling of going anywhere, because you don't go anywhere — you arrive. Foam on a jaw, the cold porcelain lip of a sink under a left hand, a mirror with a window's glare in it. A razor, already moving, already up past the corner of the mouth where — you'll learn later, though it isn't later yet — he always hesitates and doesn't this time. The second half of the shave happens fast. Water runs. Steam sits on the mirror's edge. It's early evening here, the window full of that late gold Pittsburgh light that comes low across backyards, and somewhere underneath the strangeness of standing in a body you did not grow is the ordinary, dumb comfort of warm water on your fingers.

The razor's handle is the first thing that opens him.

It's worn smooth where his grip always sits, and holding it the way his hand already knows to hold it, you get a flash — not yours, his — of a hundred mornings just like this, of foam and cold tile and the particular ache that lives in his hands lately, a small persistent tremor he's stopped mentioning to anyone. It isn't fear. It's just there, the way weather is there. He shaves around it. He always has.

The t-shirt against your back gives you more, gray cotton gone soft with washing, and through it comes the memory of pulling it on that same morning — no, that's wrong, it's this evening for him, Friday evening, and the shirt still holds the memory of the garage: engine grease that never fully leaves the collar no matter how many times Denise runs it through the wash. Denise. Wife. The name arrives whole, along with the sound of her voice calling up the back stairs that this Friday is supposed to be an early one, no closing shift, come sit outside while the light's still good. You feel, in his chest, something warm and a little guilty — he told her he'd be five minutes and it's been fifteen because he lost time again standing here, looking at his own face like it belongs to someone he used to know better.

The tattoos on the forearm come alive under your notice — a dagger through a rose, a skull gone soft-edged with twenty years of fading, and each one drags a story up with it, quick and half-formed: nineteen years old in a shop on the South Side with a friend who isn't around anymore, a summer that felt like it would never end because he was too young to know that all of them do. The wedding band on the left hand is colder than the rest of him, and touching it — just the weight of it there, familiar, unthought-of — brings Denise back again, younger, in a kitchen that doesn't exist anymore because they moved, and a daughter's small fist closing around his finger instead of the ring, years before that, in a hospital room he can still smell if he lets himself.

His body is forty-six in every part of it at once: the average, unremarkable strength in the forearms from twenty-some years of pulling wrenches and hauling starters out of engine bays, the low ache low in both knees from the concrete floor of the garage, and under all of it, quieter, something wrong that has a name he doesn't say out loud much — an autoimmune thing, flares that come and go, the reason some mornings his grip fails him before noon and some days it doesn't fail at all. The tremor in the hands isn't new. It's just part of the weather now.

There's an old ex-girlfriend somewhere in there too, a name that surfaces once, gently, unbidden — Carrie — attached to nothing but a feeling of a door closed a long time ago, no ache left in it, just a fact filed among other facts. And there is a whole private room in him that has nothing to do with Denise or the garage or the shop where they still call him Mark like it's stitched on a patch: a small shelf at home with stones on it, a candle he lights on nights nobody asks about, a faith nobody at the shop would guess he has. He doesn't drink — never has, some old promise to himself he doesn't examine — but on the rare night there's a beer in someone else's hand at a cookout, he'll bum a cigarette off whoever's got one, just for that one night, like a rule with a loophole built into it.

You are still standing at the sink. Foam drying at the jaw. Water still running.

You look down at the hand on the porcelain — his hand, tremor sitting faint under the skin like something idling — and you turn it over slow, freckled knuckles, grease worked into the lines that soap never quite gets out.

You look up into the mirror.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the window light, to a face that isn't going to ask questions because there's nobody left in there to ask them.

Whatever else this becomes — however long you keep the ache in the knees, the ring, the woman calling from the yard — hasn't been decided yet. Somewhere there's a wheel that will spin again. Not tonight, maybe. Not for a long while, maybe. But it's there, waiting the way it waited for you the first time, and you already know you're going to look at it again.