Colin Braswell

The farrier's hands smell like hoof and hot metal even at eleven in the morning, even standing still in a Dallas kitchen that isn't yours to keep, and that's the trouble with him — clean smell, dirty animal work, a life you already know the shape of because you've had less than a minute inside it. Less than a minute and already the ache is starting in the lower back, the specific complaint of a body that has spent thirty-four years bent under other creatures' weight. You didn't come here to fix a horse's shoe. You came here to spin. So you set his coffee down, gray hair, brown eyes, beauty mark you didn't ask for and don't want, and you go to the site with his own hand on the mouse, and the wheel is already turning before you've finished deciding, which is how it always goes — the deciding happens after, in the body you land in, never before.

The chair takes your weight before you've chosen to sit in it. Fluorescent light, flat and humming. A number board on the seat beside you clicks over — 47 to 48 — and the knee that was bouncing under this hand stops on the same click, like a held breath let go wrong. A paper cup, gone warm, sweats onto a knuckle. You are heavier than you were a half-second ago, wider through the shoulders, shorter, planted. Somebody calls a name from behind a door and you don't look up. You fold the hands in your lap instead, square the cup on the little wood ledge, and let the room settle into you like water finding a level.

The T-shirt is what gives you the first of it — navy cotton gone soft at the collar, and under it the memory of a dryer that runs too hot in a house that used to have two people doing laundry in it and now has one. Colin Braswell folds his own shirts now. He didn't used to. Sarah folded them, or they didn't get folded, sat wrinkled in the basket until he wore them creased and didn't care, and that was one of the last small fights, the kind that isn't really about laundry. She's been gone four months. Recent enough that his phone still autocompletes her name into the search bar of an app he pretends he doesn't check.

The forearm gives you more, skin against the cotton hem where his sleeve is rolled — script letters catching light he can't currently see but has traced with his thumb a hundred times without meaning to. *Liam. 10.12.18.* Not his son. His sister's boy, born the same week Colin's father died, and he got the ink two weeks after the funeral in a shop in Bangor that smelled like Pine-Sol and clove cigarettes, crying a little in the chair and telling the guy it was allergies. Something needed marking. That was the nearest joy he had to hand.

The chair itself, cold tube steel through his khakis, brings the waiting room up whole: a walk-in clinic off Route 1, sliding glass, a receptionist he half-recognizes from the diner. He's here because his chest does the thing again, the squeezing thing, the thing his doctor calls anxiety and his mother back in Millinocket calls a lack of prayer. He takes the pills. He goes to church anyway, sits in the third pew at Trinity Fellowship most Sundays, sings without much voice, believes it and doubts it in the same hour like everybody he grew up with. He vapes in the church parking lot before the service and feels bad about it and does it again next week.

His shoes on the linoleum, worn brown leather, give you the bar — the reach-in cooler, the mats laid down before the doors open, the particular ritual of lining bottles by height and label-out that he never breaks even hungover, even heartbroken, even the week Sarah left and he opened anyway because forty people wanted a beer and didn't care whose life had come apart behind the taps. He's good at the job. Regulars like him because he remembers what they drink and never once wants one himself — seven years dry from something he doesn't call an addiction out loud, not since the DUI, not since he decided at twenty-seven that his hands worked better sober even if his head was noisier for it.

His hand rises, unbidden, brushes his own jaw — the tell his body has always had, touching his face when his mind wanders past the edge of the room it's in — and in that small motion you feel the whole animal comfort of the gesture, thoughtless, worn smooth by ten thousand repetitions, older than any memory attached to it.

You look down at the hand on your knee. Thick fingers, a chewed thumbnail, Liam's name upside down from this angle. You turn it over once, like checking it's really yours to have.

"Forty-eight," you say, to no one, out loud, in his flat Maine vowels, and something in you is already circling back to the wheel, wondering how long the number holds before it clicks again.