Tyler Bracey

You're standing at Colin's sink, wrists under the water, and it's already wrong how fast you decided this.

Two minutes in him and you know his kitchen, his good knife set, the smell of the shop downstairs baked into everything, and it is not enough to keep you here. That's the truth of it, plain and a little embarrassing: a barber's hands, a barber's Tuesday, gray coming in at the temples like a promise you didn't ask for, and none of it holding your attention past the first look in his mirror. You dry your hands on a towel that isn't yours yet either. The phone is already out. The site loads the way it always loads, patient, a wheel drawn thin and bright against a dark field, like it's been waiting for you specifically, which it has, which is the whole business model.

You pay. You spin. You don't watch it land so much as feel the floor of Colin's kitchen let go of you.

You come up sitting forward on a couch that smells like corn chips and old leather cleaner, thumb already on a remote, volume climbing off a Cowboys highlight you did not choose to watch. The light in the room is lamp-gold, going amber at the edges the way rooms do at the end of a day. There's a can loose against your leg, warm, half-full. Your mouth was open a second ago; you can feel the dryness of it, the crease the couch arm left in your forearm. Twenty years old in every joint — nothing in this body complains yet, it just waits, coiled a little even at rest, like it doesn't fully know how to be still.

The shirt is what opens first. Maryland, faded, a gift from nobody you can immediately place — and then you can: an ex-girlfriend, a road trip two years back, a boardwalk, her laughing at you for buying a shirt from a state you'd never been to before that weekend. That's already gone soft at the edges in him, filed under fine, under no hard feelings, under people who mattered and then didn't stop mattering, just moved over to make room. The jeans, worn through at one knee from kneeling on a canvas mat more mornings than not. Your feet, bare, against a coffee table crowded with chip bags — this house is rented, this couch came with a family who left it, and you (he) never got around to replacing it because why, it works.

The can in your hand brings the loudest flash: not this can, but the six-pack, three deep already, bought on the way home because you don't drink except when you drink, and tonight was one of the nights your chest wanted the burn of a cigarette on the porch step more than the beer itself, the beer's just the thing that gives you permission. Your girlfriend texted twice tonight and you didn't answer either one, not out of anything, just Tuesday, just tired, twelve rounds of holding pads for grown men swinging like their lives depend on it, your shoulders singing with it even now, slumped here.

The earrings — small studs, cold under two fingers you don't lift, because you're not touching them, but you feel them anyway, the ghost-weight of them — came from a night that isn't sad exactly, just far: nineteen, a friend's kitchen, a needle, everyone laughing too hard because they were scared of the needle and not the ear. Your ex was there too, before she was your ex. She held your hand. That's a whole year folded into a stud earring, gone before you can hold it up to the light.

Your hands know the pen click before they know anything else about themselves — clicking, clicking, some nervous metronome from a life spent watching other men's fists instead of using your own, coaching instead of fighting, a decision made at sixteen after a doctor and an MRI and a mother's face that you are only getting flashes of, not the whole shape. The gym is a warm smell in your nose already — leather, bleach, a fan that never quite cools the room. You love it in a way that has nothing to do with money, which this body has plenty of somewhere else, quiet, inherited, never mentioned at the ropes because at the ropes nobody needs to know that.

The room is going dark-gold and small around you, a lamp doing all the work, a water tower somewhere outside this window standing over gravel and barbed wire like it's the only other tall thing for miles. You are twenty, and tired the good kind of tired, and none of this was yours four seconds ago.

You look down. The can, the hand around it — sunburned a little at the knuckle, a nick healing on one thumb from tape torn too fast. You turn it over like you're checking it's real.

You look up into the television's blue wash, into whatever is watching back, and you say, out loud, to no one in the room:

"Whose leg was I even in."