Marlon Deveaux

The site loads slow on a dead Wednesday morning, nothing else open in any of your tabs, and you almost close it twice before the wheel finishes spinning up its gaudy little animation. You have wanted this since before you could name what it was — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every thread you read at two a.m. and told no one about. It was never for sale before. Now there's a button that says SPIN and a price under it that you don't let yourself think about, and you press it because the wanting has had years to get patient and none at all to get smart.

The screen does something with light that you don't remember afterward.

You are leaning over a sink. Foam on half a face that is not the face you have never had. The razor is already at the jaw, and it moves — up, against the grain, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth, where apparently there is always a hesitation, and there is none now because you don't know to make one. The second half of the shave finishes faster than the first ever does. Fluorescent light overhead, a hum in it. Cold porcelain lip of the sink under a left hand. A ring on that hand's third finger, plain and worn thin at the underside.

The mirror gives you back a stranger — brown eyes, a dark mole riding high on one cheek, hair gone back hard at both temples into a shape like a gate — and for one full second there is nothing behind that face at all, just the water running and the fan ticking in the ceiling.

Then the shirt against your back says *sleeve, sleeve, over the head, three years old, softer than it looks* — an undershirt, and it comes with an image of a bureau drawer, folded stacks, a hand — his hand — pulling the same navy tee out from under four others because it's the one that doesn't itch at the collar. Marlon. The name comes with the shirt too, attached like a tag. Marlon puts it on in the dark most nights so he doesn't wake Denise, though Denise hasn't been in that bed in six years and some nights he still moves like she is.

The sweatpants at your ankles remember gym floors — hundreds of them, waxed hardwood under rubber mats, the particular give of a mat under a sixteen-year-old's shoulder blades as Marlon drops down to spot a takedown, *elbow in, elbow IN, there —* and his knees answer with a flare of old pain, both of them, cartilage worn thin from thirty years of kneeling on gym floors he loved more than he ever told anyone. His hands know a whistle without looking for it. His hands know how to grab a wrist and turn it without hurting, how to tape an ankle in the dark, how to shake another coach's hand a beat too hard because his father taught him a handshake is the first thing a man judges you by.

The mirror gives more the longer you stand in it. A gymnasium that smells like Icy Hot and rubber. A trophy case with his name on a plaque he pretends not to look at when he walks past it. A woman who is not Denise — Angela, the wife now, asleep four rooms back down the hall, who married him after the divorce taught him how to actually say things out loud instead of coaching around them. Two kids, grown, a daughter in Atlanta who calls on Sundays and a son who wrestled for him for one miserable furious season before quitting to play trumpet, which Marlon pretended to be disappointed about and was not, not even a little.

The tile is cold under bare feet and his stomach gives its familiar low burn, right up under the sternum, the reflux that means he shouldn't have eaten that late but the tournament ran long and the diner was the only thing open. He is fifty-six years old down to the joints. Skinny in the way that never left even after the metabolism should have caught up with him — his mother's build, everybody always says. Awake now because he never really sleeps past three, hasn't since the second divorce that didn't happen, since Angela's snoring stopped bothering him and started being the only sound in the house he trusted. He gets up. He shaves. Some nights that's the whole plan, and it's enough.

You look down. The razor is still in the hand — his hand, long-fingered, a nick healed white across one knuckle from a mat burn decades old that never quite smoothed out. You turn it over slowly, both sides, like it might tell you something the shirt and the sink and the gym floor didn't already say.

You look up into the mirror, into brown eyes that aren't asking anyone anything.

"Whole side of my face," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't yours and wasn't his either anymore, "and I don't even remember doing it."

You don't know how long you keep it. You don't know when the wheel calls you back. You just stand there a second longer, foam drying on skin that used to hesitate at the corner of the mouth, and doesn't.