Colin Vasser

The smoke hangs there a second too long, a gray thread unspooling toward the kitchen light, and by the time it clears you already know something's wrong because the kitchen doesn't smell like cake anymore. It smells like coal dust and hoof trimmings. It smells like the shop.

You're bent over the table. Your hands — his hands, narrow-wristed, callused only at the pads where the rasp sits — are flat on the wood on either side of a cake that says nothing on it because nobody bought the writing gel. Behind you, out of sight but present the way weather is present, someone is clapping. A woman's voice, warm, already laughing: "Okay, okay, make a wish count, Colin, you're twenty-two, not eighty."

Colin. Right. That's the name on the time cards you sign every other Friday. That's the man who hands you your check and tells you your clinches are sloppy and your rasp angle's still too shallow, eight months in, like he's not wrong.

You straighten up too fast, the way he wouldn't, and his girlfriend — Marisol, you place her now, you've seen her drop him off at the yard in a Corolla with a cracked side mirror — touches his arm right where the tattoo sits under the sleeve. *Thea of Sunt Twill sing.* You can't read all of it and don't try; his arm is thin under her hand, no meat to it, and you understand with a small lurch that this body has never once thrown a punch or hauled anything it didn't have to.

"You okay?" she says. "You've got a weird look."

You arrange the dimples into something like a smile, because they come whether you ask or not, sitting there in his cheeks like they're carved. "Yeah," you say, in his voice, which is lighter than you expected, a little reedy. "Just tired. Early one tomorrow."

It isn't tomorrow you're thinking about. It's today, already half gone, this one day you've got, and you spend the next several hours the way a man spends a twenty he found on the sidewalk — carefully, then not carefully at all. You eat the cake. You let Marisol feed you a bite off her fork and you watch, from inside, the way his face does something automatic and fond that has nothing to do with you, like the body remembers her even when you're the one steering.

Then, because you can't help it, because some part of you that isn't him wants to know what the hands can do, you drive to the yard in the evening, tell her you forgot to check on a horse that colicked, and you don't know if that's a lie or a truth living inside him that surfaces on its own.

The forge is banked but not out. You open it up, feed it, and the bellows-breath of it lights the stable orange the way it must every working day of his life. You pick up a shoe blank with fingers too thin for the tongs, and it's heavier than it looks, and the heat comes up your arms like it's looking for muscle that isn't there. You hold it anyway, hammer it flat and thin the way you've watched him do a hundred mornings while you swept and fetched and got told your angles were wrong.

It's not good work. But it's shaped like a shoe by the time you're done, and you set it hissing into the quench tub and watch the steam go up past a face with dimples that don't quit even now, even alone, even doing something that scares you a little — a boy's mouth built for smiling, wearing a job's worth of scars it earned honestly.

You think of Marisol's voice calling him twenty-two like it's still young enough to be a joke. You think of the date inked into his arm, someone's name pressed into his skin permanently, the kind of thing you don't get to ask him about, not today, not from in here.

By the time the light through the stable door goes the deep gray Seattle keeps instead of dark, you've banked the forge again, latched the doors, and started back toward the house, tired in a body too thin to carry the day well. Somewhere past the bridge, past the last coffee shop throwing its glow onto the wet street, you feel the pull start, faint as a draft under a door.

You don't fight it. You never do.

The last thing you do with his hands is knock on his own front door instead of using the key, because it feels like the kind of thing that ought to be given back politely — the body, the porch light, the girl already moving to answer, the whole ordinary unfinished shape of a life you were only ever borrowing.