Russell Kettner

The unibrow is the thing that finally does it. Hector Villalobos's bathroom mirror in Los Angeles, before the day has even started, before coffee, and there it is again, the single dark line over his eyes like a smear of doubt, and you stand in his skinny-fat body in his boxer shorts and you think: not this one, not again, not for one more minute. Less than a minute ago you spun and got him, and already the wanting is back, quick and ugly, an itch behind a face that isn't yours. It's not his fault. It's never anybody's fault. You just can't stand being looked at through his eyes one more second, this soft stomach, this operations-manager softness, the whole apartment smelling like the take-out he ate alone last night. You open the laptop still warm on the counter. The wheel is already loaded, spinning icon idle, waiting. You pay again. You spin.

The light gets you before anything else does — a hard white bar sliding across the dark, and you turn from it on instinct, some sleeping animal part of a body reeling away, and then something in you turns back into it instead, hungry for it, and the eyes open into the glare and hold there. Boots on the floor below you. A mattress with no frame. Foil taped over a window in crooked black-tape crosses, and beyond it, whatever hour of a Seattle morning is out there, gray and wet and none of your business yet. Your right hand doesn't close the way a hand should. It doesn't close at all — cool, jointed, patient, resting on the pillow where a hand ought to be sweating.

The shirt is what opens first. Gray cotton, soft with age, and lying in it you get a flash of a laundromat somewhere outside Spokane, quarters, the smell of somebody else's dryer sheets, a stretch of road so straight it felt like sleep with your eyes open. Then more: whole years folding in sideways. A name comes with the tattoo when your bicep shifts against the mattress — Russell — and the ink is his brother's idea, both of them nineteen and stupid outside a shop in Tacoma, tribal black because neither of them could agree on anything that meant something, so they picked something that just looked like it did. His brother's dead now, four years, a highway outside Yakima that had nothing to do with trucks at all, and that grief sits in the shoulder like an old sprain, always a little there, never all the way gone.

The wedding band is next, plain gold on the hand that still has fingers, and it brings Denise all the way up — not a flash but a flood, fifteen years of her, the two of them meeting at a diner off I-5 when she was pouring coffee and he was twenty-eight and still had both hands. The accident took the right one three years into the marriage, a coupling pin, a bad angle, and she was the one who drove him to every fitting for the prosthetic without once making him feel like less. Two kids after that. A boy who plays baseball badly and beautifully. A girl who calls him at rest stops just to hear the truck noise in the background, says it's like a lullaby. And under all of that, quieter, guiltier: Marisol, the one from two summers ago, a stop in Portland that turned into six weekends that turned into something he ended before it became a thing he couldn't take back, and Denise never found out, and he carries that the way he carries the tattoo, under a sleeve, mostly out of sight.

The boots by the mattress remember standing all night at loading docks. The prosthetic hand remembers the shape of a gearshift so well it doesn't need him thinking about it at all, remembers a coffee cup, remembers Denise's face cupped once, carefully, like she was something that could still be startled. Forty-four years old and strong through the shoulders and the low back from lifting what a body that age shouldn't still be lifting, a dull permanent ache riding along the spine like a passenger, and jaw muscles that clench and release, clench and release, have been doing it all night without him, grinding down some worry he never once let all the way up into words.

You sit up off the mattress, the shirt sour with sleep-sweat and road, and you look down at both hands — the one that folds into a fist the way any hand does, and the one that whines, faint and mechanical, when the fingers curl. You turn the prosthetic over slowly, watching the knuckles articulate, a stranger's marvel at a stranger's grief made into hardware. The foil light lies across the room in one clean stripe, cutting the boots, the mattress, the tattoo, in half.

You lift your eyes to find something to say it to, and there's nothing in the room but the tape and the light and the sound of your own new lungs, so you say it to the window anyway, low, almost amused at yourself.

"Well," you say, "let's see how long you last."