Warren Eugene Talbot

You are standing in a Philadelphia kitchen in Gerald Brophy's socks, and you have been him for less than a minute of your own counting. The coffee he made is going cold on the counter. His phone says the day is about to begin, and you cannot make yourself care about it. His body works. It is tall and easy and nothing hurts. That is the trouble. Nothing in it is asking you anything. You open the site with his thumb, and the wheel is already turning before you have decided.

Then the cold kitchen is gone and you are bent at a sink.

Porcelain edge under your left palm. Foam drying tight on half your face, the other half rough as a rasp. A razor is stopped against your jaw, and your right hand is holding it there as if it had been told to wait. Your knees are not good. Your belly rests against the cabinet. The window is blue with the hour before anything happens.

Your thumb moves on its own. It reaches for a lighter that is not in the hand and finds only the razor's plastic grip, and a flick of memory comes with it. A brass lighter, a cheap one, turned over and over in a parking lot at dusk while the air stood thick as a wet towel. He does not smoke. He never did. The hand just wants something to turn. It was his father's habit, or a coworker's, and he took it without choosing.

The shirt hangs soft on your back, washed so often it has no weight. It gives you the morning he put it on. His arm goes through one sleeve, then the other, and he is thinking of a wife asleep down the hall who does not stir. The wedding band clicks on the porcelain, and a whole kitchen comes with it: three kids' worth of years, a table with too many chairs. There was a woman after the marriage frayed, and then not after. The ring is still on, and he has not decided what that means. His standing desk, two monitors, a function that will not return the right value. The money is thin. Every month he does the arithmetic and gets the same small number.

Under your feet is a rug gone matted, and under it tile. His mother's people come up through it, a grandmother's kitchen, her hands braiding something while the radio played. He is spiritual in the unlabeled way, the way of a man who sometimes stands very still at dawn. He quit drinking. You feel the old thirst in him and how tired it is of itself.

You draw the razor up the jaw, against the grain. Your hand does not stop at the corner of the mouth where he always stops. It goes straight through. The second half goes faster than the first.

You rinse the blade and set it down. You lift your hand into the window light and turn it over: the ring, the knuckles, the pale band of skin under it. Then you look into the mirror, where a stranger with half a beard of foam looks back.

"All right," you say, in his low voice. "Let's see how long you last."

The thumb flicks once at nothing. Somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep, and you cannot tell how deeply.