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There are too many hooves.
It's been like this for a while. One day I woke up, and he had an extra one. It dangled from his body, extending the strand of flesh holding it to its limits. He wouldn't let me phone an ambulance. The mere suggestion had him ignoring me for the rest of that day. When I made dinner and he claimed his bowl, it fell off and left a bloody wound. It sat on the ground, shiny and dark as a blood clot. He insisted it stay there.
The hooves continued appearing on him. They didn't stay attached for long. When they fell, he made a point of telling me that they should never be touched or moved, even when they began to rot. Still, I decided I would throw out the first one. Flies were buzzing around the flesh on top. He bit into it until it cracked and said he wished it were my skull. The smell of rotting flesh got much worse after that; I hadn't known that hooves were more than solid keratin, but decay soon gave me an anatomy lesson. One day, he shed one right before the front door, and that was that. We had no need to go out, he said. Plenty of food in the house.
Most of the time, I did my best to avoid the hooves. But soon they were in every room, and I had no choice but to look at them. I'd take notes. The old ones were lumpy and misshapen, akin to eggs laid by a sickly hen. The new ones looked just like his normal ones, shiny and clean; it helped that some of them hadn't started to rot yet.
Speaking of the rot, it wasn't long before the flies settled in and started little maggot families, and the mice appeared shortly after. At some point they got bored of hooves, and began rooting through the cupboards. We have food in the fridge, he insisted. But we'd already eaten most of that food a long time ago.
It's been a few days since then. I almost stepped on another hoof this morning. I can still feel his eyes on me, hear the threatening clack of the hooves as of yet attached to him. The single hoof by the door is a pile of mould. Technically not a hoof at all anymore. I could leave.
But a thick circle of hooves surrounds me.