In a fast food restaurant an employee standing behind a partition couldn’t stop looking at my face and at my groin. He smiled at me. There were some people in line ahead, two of them were men, one of them was a woman, but the employee only looked at me and he asked for my number. Fifty-nine, I told him, and he said, jokingly, but, but what’s your other number, your real number? He smiled, and his colleagues laughed, and the two men in line ahead of me laughed. I didn’t laugh. The smell of peanut oil and chopped meat. The woman looked down at her feet. Someone else called my number then, fiftyniiine, the grease covered the paper bag, the grease covered it, and the employee couldn’t stop.

SPALDING

When Jazmynn’s partner left her, he left early, without much fuss. After he closed the door, slamming it, Jazmynn decided to gather all the items he had forgotten—the basketball, the cocoa butter, the cans of chicken soup, the cans of corn, the canned peas, the floral tablecloth, the rusted bicycle. She put the pile under the white sheets, on his side of the bed. Jazmynn napped with the objects; they all lay together.

Her partner had stared at her on the morning of his departure. They had been naked, his nails grazing her left breast. Her partner stared and his not quite straight teeth showed between his lips. He had a smile that made one wet, Jazmynn used to confide.

And he hadn’t warned Jazmynn of his departure, he had simply begun packing his things—slowly, silently, one by one, into small rectangles. He was a good folder.

Jazmynn sat on the edge of the bed, back curved, stomach folded, chin resting on her knee, braid hanging against her spine. She was not surprised. She had known this was coming so she sat nearby as he folded, to show her acceptance of it, to show that she was granting permission.

Her partner’s face was serious as he packed, full of tension. Jazmynn had wanted to laugh at this but decided against it. She sat there and watched him pack the rectangles and the spheres, the balls of socks—white, brown, black socks, purple socks—and the laundry detergent, the watch, the camera, the photograph of his friend Law, the razor, the eyeglasses.

Before his departure Jazmynn had helped him to shave his eyebrows, his back, his shins, and his arms with the razor. Together they rubbed cocoa butter all over his body. They shaved his pubic hair as an afterthought, the coarse curls sticking to Jazmynn’s hands. He was dressed in his jeans, a white shirt.