Trevor Ahlgren

The garage smells like brake cleaner and the coffee going cold on the tool cabinet, and you are standing in Elias Bramante's arms, which are good arms, strong ones, twenty-five years old and none of the ache you are used to carrying around in older men. You have had him for twenty-nine minutes. You like him fine. That is not the problem.

The problem is that forty minutes ago you were somebody else — a longshoreman in Honolulu, dark hair, blue eyes, a body called Kyle that smelled like salt and diesel — and for the ten minutes you wore him you kept thinking about his brother. Not meeting him. Not calling him. Just the shape of him sitting in Kyle's memory like a stone in a shoe: the brother in Boston, the one who owes everybody, the one Kyle stopped answering texts from around Easter. You felt Kyle's whole body go tight just thinking his name. That kind of feeling doesn't wash out in thirty minutes wearing somebody else. It itches. You want to go stand inside it and see what it's made of from the other side.

So you set the wrench down on the workbench, still in Elias's hands, and you don't finish the brake job, and you go to the site instead, and vessel.cards opens the way it always opens, patient as a bank, and you pay for the spin without letting yourself think about the number anymore, because the number stopped meaning anything around body forty. You touch the wheel. It goes around. It does not ask if you're sure.

—

The razor is already moving when you arrive, up along the jaw against the grain, and it does not catch or hesitate the way it's supposed to at the corner of the mouth — his hand just keeps going, faster now, sure of itself in a way the man never was a half-second ago. Foam drags clean off skin. Water runs. A bathroom bulb throws yellow light across cracked plaster and a toilet tank close enough to nudge the shaving arm on the backswing. You are bent over a pedestal sink, your own — his own — breath fogging faintly against the mirror, and the weight of this body settles onto you all at once: shorter than you're used to being, thicker through the middle, thirty years old in the knees already.

—

The plaid shirt is open over a white tank top, and touching the flannel gives you the morning it went on: pulled off the doorknob where it lives, one arm at a time, while a phone on the counter buzzed with a text from Danielle he didn't answer yet because he was already running late for a shift that starts at an hour that doesn't match this light at all — which means somewhere in the machinery of his week the day and the night have come uncoupled, and he is shaving before an evening that his body still thinks is morning. That confusion isn't yours. It's his, arriving with the shirt.

The tank top underneath gives you less, just the ordinary hundred mornings of pulling it over his head, but the tattoo under his collar — black tribal, inked in somebody's kitchen when he was twenty-two and invincible — gives you a flash of the chair, the buzzing, a friend now three states away and not returned in kind either.

The razor in his hand is the deepest thing. It knows this jaw without being told — the pressure at the neck, the careful skip around a mole near the ear, the way he always slows at the corner of his mouth out of some old nicked-once caution, except this time nothing in him slows, because it isn't him doing it anymore. His hand knows the cheap drugstore shaving cream by smell alone, knows the cold of the porcelain edge under his forearm, knows this whole cramped bathroom with its rust ring and its bad bulb the way you know a room you've stood in a thousand mornings not quite awake.

Touching the sink's edge brings the apartment: a triple-decker, storm door that sticks, three kids' shoes in a pile by a door two rooms over, a fourth pair he still buys out of habit though that kid isn't his anymore, not since Danielle happened and the last one left. He loves Danielle in the uncomplicated, grateful way of a man who does not examine why he is loved back. He loved the one before her too, and some nights still reaches for her name before he catches it.

His body carries what thirty years of not being careful carries — the dull persistent hum behind his eyes that is the sugar doing what it does when he skips the shot, the soft give at his stomach, forearms still strong from lifting boxes eight hours a day in a warehouse that smells like cardboard and forklift exhaust. His hands, when they are not busy, go to his cuticles, worry them raw; they are doing it now, underneath the razor, some other errant finger picking at itself.

There is a number that lives behind all of it, a hole he has been digging since before the second kid, one he does not tell Danielle the full size of, one that has a shape but no bottom he's found yet. Church on Sundays when he makes it. A can of something cheap and cold most nights that has stopped being a treat and started being a requirement. And under all of that, threaded through the shirt and the sink and the tattoo alike: Kyle. His brother. The name that doesn't come up at dinner. You know, now, standing in him, exactly what that felt like from Kyle's side too — you were there, in Honolulu, forty minutes and a whole ocean ago, carrying the same silence from the other end of it.

—

You lift your face from the sink, clean-shaven on both sides now, and look down at his hand still holding the razor, turning it slightly, watching the water bead and run off the blade like it belongs to someone you're only just meeting.

"Hey, brother," you say, to no one in the room, to the mirror, to whatever's listening on the other end of a silence that's gone on since Easter — and you set the razor down, and you don't know yet how long you'll let it stay quiet.