Marco Lira

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Colby Renshaw's dorm room smells like Axe body spray and old pizza, and you have been standing in front of his mirror for thirty-two minutes not recognizing a single thing about the face looking back. Blond, blue-eyed, dimpled, twenty-two years old and built like something a coach would put a hand on the shoulder of. It should feel like winning. It felt like winning for the first nine minutes, when you flexed in the mirror and admired the jaw. Then his roommate texted him something about a girl named Steph, using a nickname that meant nothing to you, and the whole apartment full of Colby's actual life closed in like a room with no windows. You are wearing a stranger's youth like a coat that doesn't know your shoulders. Six-three and none of it is yours to be proud of. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, mid-spin from last time, waiting the way it always waits, patient as a slot machine that has never once needed to be patient with you.

You click before you finish deciding to.

—

The leash goes slack in your hand and the dog looks up, ears back, like it noticed before you did.

You are standing on a sidewalk you have never seen, under trees you didn't plant, holding a dog that is not the point of anything anymore. Your body is shorter now, heavier through the middle in a way that has nothing to do with muscle, and the morning air smells like cut grass and somebody's garbage day. Your hand — a stranger's hand, brown-knuckled, a wedding band cold against the leash's plastic grip, a small tattoo on the back of it you did not choose and already regret on his behalf — winds the leash twice without being told to. The stride that follows is not quite yours yet. The dog has to learn it in real time, trotting to catch up.

The shirt is what opens first. Maroon cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and it comes with the smell of a specific detergent and the memory of pulling it over his head forty minutes ago in a bedroom with the shade half down, Elena still asleep with one arm thrown across where he'd been, and the particular quiet of a Chicago morning that belongs to nobody who has to be anywhere yet. He'd chosen this shirt because it didn't need ironing and because the day was a day off, a rare one, a Monday he wasn't at the clinic — he works the Tuesday-through-Saturday grind most vets pull, so a Monday morning on a sidewalk with the dog is a small stolen luxury, and some part of him had felt lucky about it standing in that closet, which arrives now as a plain warm fact, no drama in it at all.

The khakis carry the drive-thru coffee he'd spilled a drop of on the thigh three weeks ago, a stain he'd scrubbed at and mostly won against — comes with it a flash of the truck, the radio, a version of himself younger by exactly that argument's worth of ago, before Marissa, before the thing with Marissa that isn't a thing anymore, that he ended clean and still thinks about at 2 a.m. sometimes with something that isn't quite guilt and isn't quite relief. Elena doesn't know how close it got. Nobody knows how close it got. It sits in him the way a scar sits under a sleeve — there, felt, never shown.

The mole on the cheek is not felt so much as always known, a fact of the face the way his own name is a fact, and through it comes every mirror he's checked it in since he was nine and a kid at school called it something cruel enough to remember. The cartilage piercing throbs faint and familiar where the earring hasn't been in long enough to close. The tattoo on the neck — worse than the hand, done at twenty-three in somebody's apartment in Pilsen for forty dollars and a bad decision's worth of tequila — comes with an entire humiliating year attached, art school friends he doesn't call anymore, a version of himself that wanted so badly to be the kind of person who did things like that.

The stethoscope isn't around his neck right now but his hands remember it anyway — the weight of it, the specific coldness of the bell against a trembling animal's ribs, the exam room with the table always between him and the door because that's where the light's best and where a scared dog can see you coming. Seven years of that room. A wall of thank-you cards from clients whose pets didn't make it and were grateful anyway. The steadiness in his hands isn't strength exactly — it's practice, worn smooth, the kind of competence that lives below thought.

And under the shirt, under all of it, a body that is thirty and soft in the middle and strong enough anyway, knees a little tired from standing all week, a body that has held a squirming Rottweiler down gently and has also, last night, held his daughter above his head in the bathtub making her shriek with laughing. That memory comes last and heaviest, off nothing you're touching — off the leash, maybe, or off some fold of the morning itself — a girl not yet two, his, entirely his, asleep right now three blocks behind you in a house you've never stood inside.

The dog tugs. Somewhere behind a hedge two houses back, none of them know yet that anything has happened.

You look down at the hand holding the leash — his hand, tattooed, ringed, ordinary — and turn it over once like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the dog, to the street. "Okay. Not yet."

You don't know what you mean by it. You never do, this early. You start walking, and the dog, still learning your stride, hurries to keep up.