All the Old Haunts by Chris Lynch

toilet, your legs, as you try and go about your business in there. How can a person even go about his business, being watched like that? The answer is, sometimes he can’t.
    Right. Check the closet five hundred thousand times and five hundred thousand times nothing out of the ordinary appears. Allowing that a forty-year-old fox stole is not out of the ordinary. Three foxes, each helpfully biting on the other’s tail. And some towels, of course. And a bathroom scale.
    It could tear you apart some days, those little foxes biting each other’s tails.
    God knows what they get up to when that bi-fold door closes again.
    Shaving is a terrible, terrible, terrible thing.
    The television in the kitchen has to be on, or I cannot shave. The occasional downy whisker winds up in my Special K—I am getting fat too, so I have to get serious about the Special K and grapefruit—but that is, I think, a small price to pay.
    I probably shave too often this summer. Because I don’t have enough to do. Which I know is my own fault.
    But at least it’s Wednesday. I have to cut the lawn on Wednesday.
    When we were twelve, this is how much I trusted them. I laid myself out in the sand on Nantasket Beach, and when she told me to open my mouth and close my eyes, I actually did it.
    Call it what you want. I call it trust.
    I don’t regret it.
    When we were twelve, this is how much I trusted them. When I was afraid I had only one nut and I was too afraid to search for the missing one, I let him root around for me.
    He found it. It wasn’t much, but he found it.
    I bought him a Creamsicle.
    It is so hot around here in July you come out of the shower sweating. You towel off and then towel off again, then you race to dress before beading up again, like the reason you keep sweating is that you don’t have enough material covering your body. Then your underwear gets soaked through, then your shirt, then your pants even, and you feel so much more damp and hot and horrible than you did before your shower that you wonder why you even try.
    The wiggly heat vapors are dancing up off the blacktop like translucent streamers when I pull the front door open and stand there, like a dummy.
    Everything is so empty. The house, the street, the everything. Inside, outside, everywhere, empty. You would think that empty is a finite thing, that it stops somewhere, that empty is empty and you can’t go past empty, but it is not true. There is always more empty waiting.
    Like a dummy in loose, patchy navy blue corduroy pants and baggy black T-shirt, soaked through with sweat before I even feel the sun. That’s how I dress to cut the lawn. Nobody is around to see me, in the middle of a July Wednesday. But just the same, this is how I dress. This is where I hide.
    I didn’t used to be fat. Not any summer before. Somehow I have done the trick, of becoming both fat and hollow. I am emptier and larger than I have ever been, vast on the outside, vast on the inside and could there possibly be a solution to such a problem? You could maybe hear an echo, if you put an ear to my belly while I swallow something.
    Not that you would want to do that. I can’t think of anybody now who would want to do that.
    Showering makes me sweaty, and eating makes me hungry. Seeing people makes me lonely.
    The grass itself makes a sound, though it may be just whatever buggy wildlife we have going on in there. I am grateful for them though. They keep a buggy watch on me and I can’t even see them and I don’t understand their language. A perfect relationship.
    And I wear a hat. An old, old, old, wool Red Sox cap from the sixties or fifties.
    Last summer, and the summers before, I cut the grass on Wednesdays. I loved it. I was never alone. I wore shorts. Sometimes I wore no shirt. And without fail, one of them would come out, with an iced tea, or a lime rickey, or even with a homemade slush. That’s when I fell in love with sweating, and when a Dixie cup of lemon slush could be so satisfying