Nikhil Fonseca

The call center floor is emptying out around you, headsets on hooks, and the man whose body you're wearing — sixty, silver-haired, a gut he apologizes for at every family dinner — is not thinking about any of that. He is thinking that this shift dragged, that the customer in his last call would not stop repeating himself, that he is going home to a microwaved plate and a couch and nothing else, the way he does every Wednesday, the way this man has done every Wednesday for longer than you've been inside him. You've had him four days. Four days was enough. He is not bad, exactly. He is just *finished* — a life with no more doors in it that you haven't already opened, and the itch under your borrowed sternum has started up again, the one that only the wheel answers. You take the stairs down to the lobby because the elevator is slow, and you take out your phone before you're even through the doors, and you open vessel.cards like a man checking a score.

You spin.

You are leaning over a sink, half your face in foam, and the other half — the half already shaved — is smoother than it has any right to be, because someone else's hand just finished that side in three clean strokes and didn't flinch at the corner of the mouth. Water runs. A fan rattles in the ceiling. Through the little window the sky is going that particular indigo that only happens for about six minutes, and somewhere behind you, deeper in a house you have never stood in, a woman's voice says something you don't catch. The razor is still in your hand, tilted, a bead of foam sliding down the handle. You are five-nine now, not five-eight. You are forty, not sixty. Your knee doesn't ache. Something else does — a leg, this leg, the right one, has already started bouncing against the cabinet under the sink, tapping the particleboard, and you didn't tell it to.

The mirror gives you a face with a nose that leans a few degrees off true, and looking at it does something the wheel never quite prepares you for: it feels *lived in*. Your left hand is braced flat on the edge of the sink and the ring on it is warm from your own skin, and that's where he comes in first — not as a fact but as a weight, the specific give of a wedding band worn fourteen years, through two jobs and one bad winter, through a fight in a Kroger parking lot that still makes his stomach drop to remember, though not why. Priya. Her name arrives with the ring, unbidden, the way a smell arrives before the memory of the kitchen it belongs to. She is asleep, or reading, or watching something with the volume low — the voice you half-heard — and the marriage that comes with her name is not perfect and is his, entirely his, twelve years of learning to fold a fight small enough to fit through a doorway without either of them saying sorry first.

The razor gives you more. Not this morning — evening, dusk, a night shave before God knows what, some second half of a day that isn't over, and his hand around the handle knows the drill in a way that has nothing to do with thinking: three strokes with the grain, up along the jaw, and always, *always* a hitch at the corner of his mouth, a half-second where the blade stalls because some year — sixteen, maybe seventeen — he caught himself there and it bled for an hour and never quite let him forget it. Except this time there was no hitch. This time the second half went faster than the first, no hesitation at all, and some small animal part of him that isn't speaking anymore would have noticed that, if it still could.

The t-shirt against your back came off a hanger in a bedroom you can now see clearly — beige carpet, a box fan, Priya's cardigan on the door hook — and pulling it on this morning had been thoughtless the way putting on your own skin is thoughtless, over the head, arms through, the collar snapping back against your throat, already smelling like the drawer. The jeans came next, worn soft at the knee from three years of kneeling on a warehouse floor to reach the bottom shelf of a rack, and your hands — his hands — know that motion so well they twitch through it standing still: reach, scan, place, the gun's trigger cold and familiar even absent from your palm right now. A forklift beeping somewhere that isn't here. Aisle 14. A supervisor named Dave who isn't cruel, just loud. None of it glamorous, all of it his, and there's an old ex tangled somewhere back in the years before Priya — a name that surfaces and slides away again before you can hold it, a girl from a town over, a version of him that almost went a different way and didn't. He let it go. He does not regret it, mostly, on the Wednesdays that are like this one, ordinary, unremarkable, foam going tacky on his jaw.

He never drank much and quit what little there was; no cigarette has ever touched this mouth. His body is unhurt, unscarred beyond the nose, average in every measurement, forty and holding — a body that has done nothing spectacular and nothing has been done to it, which after seven hundred and thirteen others feels, for a moment, almost like rest.

You set the razor down. You look at your left hand — his hand — turn it over once under the bathroom light, foam drying at the wrist, the ring catching gold, the leg still going against the cabinet like it never got the message that anyone new arrived. Then you lift your eyes to the mirror, not at him, at *you*, whoever's watching from the other side of that glass now.

"Almost didn't recognize you," you say, and you don't know yet if you mean tonight, or some Wednesday further off, still unspun.