Prashant Deol

It's the middle of the day here, a Sunday, and the clinic smells like antiseptic and wet dog even through somebody else's nose. Danny's nose. Three minutes in this dad-bod body and already the boredom is a physical thing, sitting behind the sternum like gas. A broken-nosed man leaning on an exam table in Western Kansas, gloved hand still faintly smelling of a Labrador's ear infection, and you think: this is a life someone would want, and it is not one you want to keep living for however many hours are left in it. Nothing happened. That's the whole problem. Nothing is going to happen here for the rest of the day, and you have had thirty seconds of that already, and thirty seconds too many. You pull the glove off with your teeth, wipe your thumb on the site's icon on your phone before you even sit down, and spin.

The room changes before your stomach does.

You are bent at the waist over a pedestal sink, cold porcelain rim biting into a palm, a razor stopped mid-stroke against a jaw that is not the jaw you had a half-second ago — shorter, softer at the belly, foam gone thin and grey on one cheek and gone entirely on the other. The bathroom light is a bare bulb, too warm, too close, and it is afternoon here, low and grey through a window you can't see, storm light. The razor finishes the stroke on its own, up against the grain, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth. Whoever last used this hand didn't need to think there. You do not either, apparently, because the motion already knows the shape of that mouth.

The mirror gives you freckles. A crew cut. Brown eyes with something tired folded into the corners of them. A wedding band clinks once against the tap.

The sink is cold enamel gone warm where his — your — hand has been resting on it for longer than you have. That's the first door: his weight leaning into porcelain every morning for nine years in this apartment, the third floor of a triple-decker with a storm door that never latches right, and Meena downstairs yelling up that the coffee's on. The razor is next — cheap, drugstore, the kind you buy four at a time — and it opens onto years of this exact motion, this exact hesitation he no longer makes at the corner of his mouth because a long time ago he cut himself there badly enough that Meena laughed and then felt bad about laughing and kissed the spot, and now his hand just knows to slow down and doesn't need to anymore.

The shirt on the hook behind the door — you haven't put it on yet but you can already feel it, olive flannel gone soft with washing, green at the cuffs that won't ever fully come out — and putting it on this morning (his morning, hours behind wherever you were) comes back sleeve by sleeve: left arm first, always left, some old habit from his father who dressed that way, right shoulder still a little tight from hauling buckets of gladiolus off the truck at five a.m. His hands know the wet bench without being told — thumb finding the exact place on the stem to strip thorns, the small mean pleasure of a clean diagonal cut with the pruner that's older than his marriage. The freckles across his nose have a story too, some sun in Nashua as a boy, his mother telling him they were luck.

There's a girl who isn't Meena in here somewhere — Priya, years back, the coffee shop by Symphony Hall, the ring not yet on this hand — a warmth that surfaces and doesn't apologize for surfacing, folded now into something small and settled, a name he still knows the sound of and doesn't say. And under that, two kids' voices from the kitchen, an argument about a video game, and Meena's voice over it telling them Papa's almost ready, and the leg under him already starting its bounce against the cabinet door before he's even upright, before he's even you — cholesterol pills on the counter by the toothbrush, a doctor's voice in his head saying *cut back*, hookah twice a year with his brother-in-law on the porch and pretending that doesn't count.

The last blade stroke, the corner of the mouth, no flinch. You straighten up.

You look at the hand on the sink — short fingers, one green-black stain worked into the pad of the thumb that soap never quite lifts, the band catching the bulb's light — and you turn it over like it might answer something, and you lift your eyes to the mirror instead of away from it.

"Okay," you say to the fogged glass, quiet, like you're the one deciding when. "Let's see how long you last."