Tomás Vidigal

The apartment is doing the thing it does on Fridays, where the light goes orange and then gray and you don't move to turn a lamp on. You have scrolled through everything there is to scroll through. Somewhere in the last hour you typed the address you have typed before, at two in the morning, half-joking with yourself, and closed the tab before it loaded. This time you don't close it. The wheel is ugly in a way that feels almost reassuring, like it wasn't built by anyone trying to sell you a feeling. You pay what it asks. You put your finger on it the way you'd flick a coin, and it goes, and you are already gone before you see it stop.

There is a hedge. There is the smell of leaves at night, wet at the roots, and a small dog's shoulders working against a taut line. Your hand — his hand — is at the end of a retractable leash, and it has already stopped walking without you, mid-stride, weight caught between one foot and the other. The dog looks up past the hedge, ears back, reading something in the man that isn't him anymore. The leash slackens in your fist. You wind it twice, out of nothing, out of instinct that isn't yours yet, and start walking again at a pace the dog has to scramble to learn.

It is the middle of the night here and you did not expect that — where you came from the sky was still doing its long orange goodbye, and here it is black and close and smells like someone else's country. You do not understand yet why a man his age is out walking a dog in the dead dark on a Saturday, and then the sweatshirt against your back gives you the first of it, unbidden: a delivery shift that starts at midnight and runs till the trays of pastry go into the ovens at five, and the dog gets walked whenever there's a gap, sun or none, because the dog doesn't know what time it is and neither, some weeks, does he.

The hoodie is soft at the cuffs from washing, and touching it gives you a Tuesday — him pulling it over his head in a room with a water stain shaped like Italy on the ceiling, his girlfriend still asleep with one arm thrown off the mattress, and the specific quiet care he takes not to wake her, because she worked a shift too and because he loves the ten extra minutes she gets when he's careful. Ana. The name arrives with the feeling of saying it, low, in a doorway, more times than you could count. There is also, underneath that, a smaller and older feeling that doesn't have a doorway attached to it — a woman named Beatriz who left for Porto four years ago and who he still, uselessly, checks a certain café's window for when he has no reason to be near it.

The sweatpants at your legs, gray and gone soft at the knee, bring back nothing so much as tiredness — long stretches at a cutting table in the window of Senhor Baptista's shop, the particular ache that lives across his shoulders by six in the evening from bending over cloth, the callus along the side of his right middle finger where a needle rides all day. His hands know things without asking: how to run a tape without looking at the numbers, how to hold pins in his lips and never swallow one, how to press a seam flat with the heel of his palm. He is twenty and his hands are older than that.

The shoes are the last thing, worn canvas, and they give you the morning itself, the one before this night, sleeve by sleeve — him pulling the hoodie on backward once and laughing at himself in the dark, Ana's voice muffled into the pillow telling him to go already, the door easing shut so the latch wouldn't click. He drank more than he meant to on Thursday, the taste of it still faintly present in the body like a held breath, a bottle of vinho tinto that turned into most of a second one, alone, after Ana had gone home, for no reason he'd tell you or anyone. There is a whole life folded into cloth and drink and a dog's leash, ordinary and heavy and entirely his, and for these few seconds it is also entirely yours, all of it arriving at once the way water finds every low place in a floor.

The dog tugs. Real weight, real leash, real hand.

You stop walking again, this time on purpose, and lift that hand up in front of your face like it's the first hand anyone has ever had. You turn it over. Callus, freckle, the pale ghost of a healed pinprick on the pad of one finger. You run it, without deciding to, over your scalp, feeling the pompadour hold its shape under your palm the way it apparently always does, some tailor's vanity that isn't yours but is, now.

"Foda," you say, to the hedge, to the dog, to nobody — his voice, thick with sleep-hour and useless wonder, coming out of a mouth you didn't grow. Then you laugh, once, short, because there is no one to explain it to, and the dog, satisfied with the hedge, finally decides to walk.