For Thirty-Five-Days

It wasn’t that he hid from hygiene; he didn’t chase it down either. Somewhere between apathy and endurance lived a small idea he called “frugalness.”

It made him proud, in a way that was both pathetic and heroic. He wore his blue jeans for thirty-five days straight, and each morning when he pulled them on, the denim seemed to sigh, remembering the weight of his life.

The jeans had once been a sharp, dark indigo, but now they were a fading ocean of stains from oil of a broken fan belt, mustard from a gas station hot dog, and a mysterious dark patch near the thigh he couldn’t quite explain. Each blemish felt like a badge of perseverance.

He’d say to himself, quoting Ben Franklin, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” though it never seemed to accumulate anywhere meaningful.

He lived in a one-room apartment with wallpaper that surrendered decades ago. The sink leaked, the light above the stove flickered, and the floor slanted toward the door as though even the building wanted him gone.

His landlord didn’t like him, but he paid on time, so that was that.

He worked nights at a printing plant on the edge of town, where the air was thick with the smell of ink and solvent. Machines coughed and shuddered as if protesting the endless run of paper through their metal throats.

The foreman, a man named Groves, didn’t talk much, but when he did, it was usually to say something useless like, “You missed a spot,” or, “Try not to stink up the break room.”

He didn’t take it personally. He’d learned a long time ago that other people’s disgust could be a kind of armor, and if they kept their distance, he didn’t have to pretend.

On day twenty-seven, a woman named Teresa started at the plant. She had a voice like tired gravel and eyes that saw everything. She sat across from him at the break table, sipping instant coffee from a paper cup.

“Thirty-five days, huh?” she said, nodding at his jeans.

He blinked, confused. “How’d you know?”

“Just looks like the kind of number you’d settle on.”

She didn’t say it cruelly, and that threw him off. Most people either mocked or ignored him. He felt a strange urge to defend himself, but words stumbled out wrong.

“Still got some life left in them.”

“I bet,” she said, half-smiling. Then she looked away.

The next night, she didn’t show up. Groves said she’d quit.

No explanation. The factory air felt heavier after that.

He went home that morning and stared at his jeans on the floor. He thought of washing them, even got as far as filling the sink with water.

But when he dipped the denim in, the water clouded, and something about the way it looked, like dirty history bleeding out, made him stop. He pulled the jeans back up, still wet and cold, and went to bed.

By day thirty-five, they were stiff as cardboard. When he walked, they made a soft rasping sound, like dry leaves.

That morning, he sat by the window, drinking coffee and listening to the traffic outside. It wasn’t that he enjoyed the smell of himself or the look of those jeans. It was that they reminded him he’d survived another month, quietly, cheaply, stubbornly.

He thought maybe on day thirty-six he’d change. Wash them.

Perhaps buy new ones, but not yet. Not today.

He stood, stretched, and went to work. The jeans followed him like a second skin, loyal, patient, and unashamed.