Samir Whitehorse

It is the dead part of the morning, before anything has started, and you have been scrolling since the light went gray. Nothing in it. The same threads, the ones you have always gone back to: the man who wakes up in his brother's body, the film where the mother and the daughter trade places. Years of this. A private fascination you never said aloud. Then a page with a wheel on it, and a price, and you pay because it is a dull hour and you do not believe it. You spin.

The sink is cold under your palm. Your palm. The razor is stopped against a jaw, and the foam on half this face is going warm and tacky. The window behind the glass is deep blue, evening where you have just come from morning. A Sunday, somehow. Your leg is bouncing. It was bouncing before you came, and it does not stop.

You move the razor because it is already moving. Up the jaw, against the grain, and the corner of the mouth comes, and you do not hesitate, and something in the body flinches at your not hesitating, as if you skipped a stair it counts.

The cotton shirt hangs from your shoulders, soft, washed to nothing. A memory comes up through it: this morning's drawer, the gray one, pulled on over a stomach he has stopped apologizing to. Before church he'd put on the good shirt. Tonight this one. The plaid pants at your legs hold another flash: a daughter's Christmas gift, too loud, worn out of love.

The sink edge gives you the house. A mortgage letter on the counter downstairs, the number in it like a tooth. Sixty thousand under, he thinks, always under, and counts it at red lights. Through the razor's plastic handle comes a hallway, lockers slamming, a boy in his office who will not look up, and the principal's voice going gentle, because gentle is the only thing that ever worked. Through the cold tap, once, a woman before the girlfriend, her laugh in a car, and an ache that has no business being this clean after so many years. The moustache under your thumb is his vanity, trimmed on Saturdays. A cigarette's ghost sits in the back of the throat, eleven years quit and still asking. Beyond the door, Orthodox candle wax and incense in the hair of his Sunday, and a prayer he says without believing the words, only the rhythm. Your knees ache. Your back, bent over the sink, is a plank of old argument. The hands are strong and know the razor better than you do.

You rinse the blade. You set it down. You lift the hand and turn it over, the knuckles broad, freckled at the wrist, nothing of yours in it.

You look up into the mirror, into brown eyes, and say, low, "Okay. Okay, it worked."

Somewhere under the foam the question is already waiting: how long.