Warren Getchell

You are standing in a mail carrier's body on a lunch break he did not ask for, in an apartment that smells like microwave rice, and you are bored of him in a way that has nothing to do with him. Danny Kowalski is a good body — thick through the shoulders, dimples that make people trust him at doors, a route he knows without thinking — and that is exactly the problem. Less than a minute in him and already the walls of his life are visible: the same six blocks, the same short women who tip him at Christmas, the same phone with three numbers on it that matter. You did not come back for Danny. You came back because the wheel is still open on the counter, because you are 115 men deep and the thing that scares you now is not what you might become, it is stillness — the idea of just being one person, all the way to the end of an afternoon. You put your thumb — his thumb — on the screen. You spin.

The sponge is already in your hand.

Water is running somewhere down by your feet, cold, real, and the door panel in front of you is a smear of white suds catching gray light, and your body — this body, not the one you had half a breath ago — is 62 years old and it knows it: a low ache sits in both knees, your lower back has an opinion about the angle you're bent at, and there is a heat behind your sternum that isn't the sun, it's blood pressure doing what it does on humid days. Your scalp is bald and it is not warm out, the light is the flat cold light of a coast, not a city, and gulls are complaining somewhere behind a tree line. Your grip on the sponge shifts without your permission — thumb tucked in, wrist drawing a small tight circle — muscle that has done this ten thousand times deciding, for one half-second, before you do.

Then the shirt.

It is thin, gray, a size he has worn so long the collar is soft as cloth gets when it stops being new, and touching it — being in it — gives you his hands doing the buttons this morning, standing in front of a mirror gone spotted at the corners in a bathroom that smells like Barbasol and salt air. Warren Getchell. The name arrives with the shirt, the way his own name always sounds a little strange to him said in his head, like he's still getting used to sixty-two. He'd pulled the shirt over his head and thought about Diane — not his wife, he has no wife, has never had one — Diane who he has been seeing eleven months now, who likes that he still goes to the early service at the Baptist church on Route 1 even though his knees complain about the pew, who does not push about the ring he has not bought. And under that, older, a name that still catches somewhere soft: Carol. Twenty-two years divorced from her and some mornings buttoning a shirt still puts her in the room, not painfully, just present, like a smell.

The overalls next — denim gone the color of a Nova Scotia sky, stiff with old soap, and they bring the shop. Getchell's Barber, four chairs though he only runs one most days, the smell of Barbicide and hot neck powder, forty years of straight talk over buzzing clippers, deacons and lobstermen alike sitting still for him because his hands are steady and his opinions, mostly, are not offered unless asked. His right hand knows the weight of clippers the way it will never again have to think about a comb. His left leg is bouncing right now, has been since he clipped the seatbelt off after early errands, a tic older than the marriage that ended and the shop that didn't.

The hose, cold rubber underfoot where it's looped in the driveway. Lobster traps stacked by the shed, silvered shingles on the house behind you, a car he is proud of without saying so — bought used, paid outright, the one indulgence a barber allows a barber. Sponge, suds, wide slow arcs down the door panel, a Monday off, quiet, nobody needing a shave, no clock on him but the one in his own chest, which never fully stops nagging.

You look down. Your hands — his hands, freckled to the wrist, a sponge dissolving suds between the fingers — and for a second the shape of them is completely unfamiliar and completely certain, the way a stranger's face in a mirror is certain.

You lift your eyes to the water running past your boots, then further, like there's a lens there, though there is only the empty driveway and the trees.

"Well," you say, in his voice, dry as he'd say it about weather he didn't order, "that's a new one."