Steven Pruett

The evening is nothing, which is the whole point of it. Friday, the light gone gray-blue in the window, the day's obligations discharged and nothing left to fill the space they leave. You have scrolled through everything there is to scroll through. And then you are back on the tab you keep telling yourself you'll close, the one with the wheel on it, vessel.cards, the one you found at two in the morning some other week and did not believe, and have not stopped thinking about since. You have wanted this since before you knew to call it wanting — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every thread of people insisting it could happen, insisting it should. Now there's a price and a button. You pay it before you can talk yourself out of it. You spin.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no in-between. There is a sink, close under your face. Foam, half a jaw of it, going tacky at the edges. A razor, already moving, already yours in a hand that is not the one you had — thick fingers, a plain gold band worn soft at its edges, a forearm coming into your sightline with color on it, a shield, wings, letters you don't have time to read because the razor is already climbing his jaw against the grain, sure of itself, not slowing at the corner of his mouth the way it always slows there, the way he doesn't know it always slows there. The second half of his face gets done faster than the first. Nobody in this bathroom notices but you, and you don't know yet why it would matter.

The water is running. The mirror is old, silver going at one corner. And everything the hand touches starts talking.

The razor first — cheap, a drugstore three-blade, and underneath the touch of it a whole ritual unspools: he has shaved this way since he was seventeen years old, in a house four counties from here, his father teaching him strokes at this same short angle, telling him a man goes with the grain unless he wants a face like a plucked chicken. He never once told his father he goes against the grain on the second pass because it's faster and he's usually running late for a showing. Thirty years of small private disobedience in a bathroom mirror.

The sink rim under his other palm — porcelain, a hairline crack he's known by feel for a decade — and it brings back the house itself, cheap and old and paid off free and clear, bought back when this was the cheap end of the road and is still the cheap end of the road, and he loves it with an ownership that has nothing to do with what it's worth. He is worth more than this house many times over now. Commissions on land nobody thought would move, on cabins going up along the ridge for people from Cincinnati and Columbus who want a view and a creek. He has done well. He does not act like a man who has done well, and that not-acting is its own kind of pride.

The T-shirt against his back, the one he pulled on an hour ago — soft from washing, a little tight now across a belly he stopped fighting years back — gives up the whole morning: he stood in the closet in his shorts, jaw already tight without him deciding to clench it, because there's a showing today on a property with a long gravel drive and his knees do not love gravel anymore, haven't loved much of anything below the waist since a fall off a roof of a house he was staging himself to save the fee, eleven years ago, an idiot thing to do at his age even then. He reached for the blue shirt because his wife likes him in it, said so once in a doorway years ago and he never let himself forget it, and pulling it over his head this morning his shoulder caught the way it always catches and he breathed through it the way he always breathes through it, an old married conversation between him and his own body that nobody else is invited to.

The wedding band gives the most, unasked, the way it always does: her, a night at the lake before either of them had learned to be careful with each other, and the years since have not been unbroken good ones — there was a year, maybe two, where he thought about the girl he'd been with before her more than a married man should, a woman he has not spoken to in a decade and still, God help him, can call to mind exactly, her laugh, a specific afternoon. He never did anything about it. He isn't sure if that makes him faithful or just a coward, and the ring doesn't answer that, it just keeps giving him the two kids, grown enough now to mostly not need him, a text thread with his daughter that makes him grin at his phone in parking lots.

His right forearm brings the loudest thing, low and constant like a hum under everything else: not a memory exactly, more a station he served at, a base, men whose names come with the shield in a rush too fast to sort, and under it, folded in with the tattoo like it was inked at the same time, the small Friday habit — not tonight, but some Fridays, a glass poured a little heavier than his wife pretends not to notice, the ex-smoker's twitch of a want for a cigarette he hasn't let himself have in eleven years, a hand that still sometimes goes looking for a pack that isn't there.

The floor under his feet, bare, cool — a body long used to standing on hard floors at open houses, back complaining the way it complains most days now, a low continuous bill he has learned to stop presenting to himself. Big, tired, capable hands. A jaw already tight, though nothing here is worth being tight about.

You are still bent to the mirror. Half his face finished twice.

You lift your head — his head — and look down at the hand holding the razor, at the band on the other one gripping the sink, at foam going gray-white on both, and you turn the razor hand over slowly like you've never seen a hand do that before.

"There you are," you say, to the mirror, to nobody, and you don't know yet if you mean him or you.