Danilo Freitas

Terrance Ojo's clinic smells like antiseptic and wet dog, and you have been him for forty seconds and already you hate the smell. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, though you wouldn't say it out loud even to yourself. It's not the smell exactly. It's that this body — tall, thin-wristed, careful — spent eight years becoming a man who kneels on cold tile and tells women their cats are dying, and you inherited all of that competence with none of the wanting behind it. His hands know how to find a vein on the first try. Yours don't want to. You stand in his office at two in the afternoon on a Monday, a manila folder open on the desk in front of you, and you think: not this one, not today, and you don't even walk to a computer. The wheel is already open in your head the way a door is open when you've been through it thirty-six times before. You spin it standing up, in his shoes, in his coat, with his own handwriting on the folder in front of you, and none of that gets to finish being a sentence.

The hose is running before you have a body around it. Then you have one — compact, warm, sun on the back of a neck that hasn't decided yet whether it's early or late. Your hand is closed around a sponge. Soap slides down a car door in front of you in a long gray arc and your thumb, without asking you, tucks in against your palm and your wrist turns two small circles, and the arc stops. The swirl stops. Somewhere behind your eyes a habit older than you finishes a motion you didn't start.

It comes in through the sponge first — stupid, small, immediate: don't scrub in straight lines, it scratches the clear coat, circles lift the grit instead of dragging it, his father taught him that on a Ford Ranger with a rag and a bar of Dawn dish soap when Danilo was maybe nine, red dirt yard, same red dirt under different feet. Then the hose — the rubber of it is split near the spigot, has been for two years, he keeps meaning to tape it and never does, and there's a whole small marriage folded into that never-doing, into the way his wife rolls her eyes at the wet patch on the concrete every Sunday morning. The slippers under your feet — flip-flops, foam gone soft and shaped wrong from years of the same two feet — bring back a whole beach, her laughing at him for wearing them to a job interview once, back when he was twenty-two and thought he might do something other than this.

The shirt is the big one. Gray cotton, soft from washing, and it comes with the whole morning: getting up before light because the horses at the Wong place need shoeing before the sun gets ugly, pulling this shirt over his head in the dark so he doesn't wake her, the mattress creaking, her hand finding his hip anyway and staying there a second like she does even asleep. The apron isn't on him now but the memory of it is stitched into his shoulders anyway — the weight of it, leather gone stiff with old sweat and forge-black, the particular ache low in his back that a farrier's body carries by twenty-six the way older men carry it by fifty. Bent over a hoof for the four-hundredth time this month, rasp in hand, a horse's weight leaned trusting into his shoulder, the smell of hot keratin when the shoe kisses it. His hands know this the way Terrance's hands knew veins — a competence with no distance in it, because this one he chose.

There's an ex in here too, arriving sideways, unbidden, off nothing more than the smell of soap and cut grass — a girl named Lani from before the wife, red hibiscus by her carport, a fight he still doesn't fully understand the shape of, six years gone and still capable of putting a small flat stone in his chest when her name comes up at family things. And under all of it, steady as a heartbeat, the wedding band pressing cool against his finger where it's always been, worn smooth, put on in a backyard with paper lanterns and her mother crying into a plate of food, no church, no god, just her voice and his and the sound of somebody's dog barking through the vows.

The car — his wife's, a gray SUV with a dent in the rear bumper from a shopping cart neither of them fixed — keeps dripping soap in front of you, patient, waiting for the sponge to move again.

You look down. Your hand — brown-knuckled, a nick healed white across one thumb from a rasp slipping eleven months ago, the ring catching the early light — turns over in front of your face like you've never seen a hand do that before.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the wet driveway, to the red dirt going dark where the hose has been running too long. "Okay. Let's go again sometime."

You don't know when. You pick the sponge back up.