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porcelain sink. Did the razor still wait for this face, for contact with this skin?
    The razor would not know, of course, that the body was not coming back that day. Would someone? She had watched the news after dinner last night, sandwiched between Harmon and her mother on a couch that took up most of the main room of the trailer. Two bedrooms, a closet of a bathroom, an eat-in kitchen sandwiched it. Harmon had been drinking a beer, running his finger up and down the sweaty can absently, in a way that made her shudder. Her mother smoked a cigarette, her breaths heavy, and wet between drags.
    â€œWhaddya you care about the news all of the sudden, Lincoln?” Harmon had asked. When Harmon was at the trailer, he asked all the questions while her mother breathed, or sighed, her formless shape a cloud that hovered behind them, threatening rain.
    â€œSchool project,” Lincoln had muttered.
    â€œAbout time you learned about the world, all the shit that’s going on it,” he said, taking a long swig. “You ain’t a child no more.”
    The body had begun to settle, like a house, a deflating balloon. Lincoln placed her hand on the hard, cold chest, a mannequin’s chest, a lifesaving dummy like the ones in which she practiced CPR at the high school in the summer. It was broad but sunken, unlike Harmon’s chest, which was muscled and fat all at once. When Lincoln first learned about her body, it was in health class last year. The boys and girls had separate classes, and Lincoln, along with the other girls, learned about the changes her body would experience in puberty. Her breasts would ripen, like peaches or perhaps pears, hair would begin to grow in places it hadn’t before, she would get her period and fully experience, eventually, the sole purpose of her body: to procreate.
    Lincoln would stand in front of the mirror in the closet-sized bathroom of the trailer examining herself, pressed against lotions and perfumes and other things her mother used to hide her real scents and attract men like Harmon. But shouldn’t the real scents be enough? Lincoln had always wondered. Why confuse a mate with foreign scents of jasmine, gardenias? And why did Lincoln have so many thoughts, thoughts about the world and love and unhappiness, if all she were, as the other girls snickered, were just a body, a baby-making machine?
    lt was around this time that Harmon had begun to notice Lincoln’s body as well. Sometimes, when Lincoln’s mother worked nights at the convenience store, he would come in to kiss her goodnight, something he had not shown much interest in a year ago, or even six months ago. His chest hovered over her in the bed. She thought she would suffocate, his gold cross pressed against her cheek, scraping up and down, creating a riverbed for his sweat to traverse down to her neck. Lincoln learned about her body through Harmon’s thick, calloused hands, which would rub and roughly stroke the length of her body, his rough cheek against hers, his babymaker a hard cylinder against her.
    She learned that she did not like her body. On nights after he left, Lincoln unlearned everything there was to know about it, the strange, slightly erotic sensations she felt when Harmon touched her a certain way, the sharp gasp of penetration. She also unlearned her face, the sensations in her lips, the sound of her voice, the world before her eyes. At night she lie, stiller than anything she’d ever known, until she could pinch the soft insides of her arms and not feel it, slice the soft of her wrists in the shower and not care. She could vacate herself so thoroughly that if someone, anyone looked at her, it was as if they were looking into her eyes and out the back of her head, as if she were a veil, or a rustling collection of tree branches that showed glimpses of the sky.
    She named the body Peter. She lifted his arms and folded them across his chest. His arms were thin, with dark hair