Terrence Aubuchon

Liam Estrada's van smells like conduit dust and drive-thru bags, and you have been him for forty-nine minutes, and already the itch is back. He is nineteen and heavy and his knees ache getting in and out of the van, and there's a beauty mark by his mouth you keep catching in the side mirror like it belongs to someone else, because it does. You spun him last night out of boredom in a body you don't remember anymore, and now you are bored of him too, sitting in a Mission District parking spot on your lunch break, thumb already on your phone, already on vessel.cards, already watching the wheel spin past faces like a slot machine that only pays out in men. You do it because forty-nine minutes is long enough to know a body's whole shape, its aches, its little tells, and because knowing it is somehow worse than not. You tap. It lands.

The tap is running. That's the first thing — water, close, loud — and a molar under a toothbrush, foam gone thin and minty at the corner of a mouth that isn't asking permission to be yours. Your hand — his hand — brings the brush to the other side, slower now, working the back teeth like it's been done ten thousand times before, an unconscious swap of sides that happens on some private schedule that isn't yours to know yet. You spit. Rinse twice. Set the brush bristles-up in a glass gone grey at the bottom, the kind of grey that means years, not weeks.

The mirror gives you a face with freckles scattered like a handful of thrown sand across brown skin, dark eyes with nothing performed in them, a fade gone soft on top where the clippers stopped weeks ago. A wedding band, plain, catches the bathroom light.

Then the shirt gives it up first — grey, thin, worn a hundred washes soft — and you're standing in a closet that smells like cedar blocks and his wife's perfume drifting over from her side, and there's a morning, early, humid already at seven, pulling this exact shirt over his head because the vest goes over it and the vest is heavier when it's got the camera hanging off the strap. Plaid pajama pants down around his ankles a second ago, now jeans, the good ones with the tear at the knee that happened on a shoot crawling under a porch for a low angle, denim gone soft in a way only years get you. Boots by the door, laces already broken in, no thought needed to tie them, muscle doing what muscle does.

The floor under your — his — feet is old pine, and it gives you the shotgun house whole: one room wide, light coming clean through front to back on a good day, wife's coffee mug always left in the sink, the reflector propped against the hallway wall from a shoot that ran long this afternoon, sun out, steam still coming off Dryades after the rain. A wedding, three years now, in a chapel that smelled like carpet and candle wax, her in white, him sweating through a rented suit because it was July and nobody tells you July in Louisiana laughs at air conditioning. Church on Sundays. No coffee, no wine, no cigarettes ever, and none of it a burden, just the shape of a life he chose and never questioned twice. His hand — this hand, your hand now — rising unbidden to the short beard along his jaw, tugging at it the way it does when there's nothing else to hold, a habit older than the marriage, older than the camera.

The camera. That's the one that goes deepest — cold metal body, the particular weight of the lens hanging off the strap across his chest even now, off-duty, forgotten on him like a second collarbone. A wedding shot at golden hour. A funeral he almost turned down and was glad after that he didn't. The client this afternoon complaining about shadows while he adjusted the reflector one more degree, patient in a way that had nothing to do with the money, $150 an hour and rising and none of it why he does it.

You rinse the sink out of habit that isn't yours yet and is already becoming yours.

You look down at freckled knuckles, at the ring catching the bulb's yellow light, and you turn the hand over once, like checking if it's really attached.

"There you are," you say to the mirror, and you don't know yet if that's forty-nine minutes or forty-nine years, and neither does he, because there's no he left in here to wonder.