Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge

Monica McFawn

 

I

A pony hangs from a sling in the middle of a barn aisle in Indiana. His front right cannon bone is broken and in a thick white cast with a slight curve for the knee. He is a silver dun with patches of white on his head, belly, and streaking his mane. His name is Snippet; he is eleven years old and thirteen hands high. His past is unknown, though for a time he was likely owned by the Amish and used as an errand-running horse for the children. At some point, he was neglected, and ended up skeletal and shaking in an auction ring in Shipshewana, Indiana. He was purchased, for sixty dollars, by Heart’s Journey, an equine rescue nonprofit. After he was rehabbed, he became known as the Painting Pony, one of the few horses that has been trained to lift a brush in his mouth, dip it into a bucket of paint, and press it to a large sheet of paper, again and again. Then he broke his leg.

His sling hangs from the rafters from four points, suspending him inches from the aisle floor. He is hooked to an IV that enters into the arched muscle of his neck. Beneath him, white sawdust covers the concrete, and a Rubbermaid box filled with antibiotics, Vetwrap, bandages, Betadine, bute, etc. is stored off to his right. His water bucket, grain pan and haynet are propped up in front of him on a wooden cart. The stall doors, off to his right and left, are decorated with get-well cards. Most of these contain his crude likeness, drawn under rainbows or amongst a funnel cloud of hearts and stars. A few depict him painting, leaning back and dangling the brush from a dexterous hoof. There is a tinfoil helium balloon that says “Get Well Soon” tied around the stall bars, and a small herd of stuffed animals are tucked between them. One of Snippet’s own paintings—irregular puffs of green, blue, and pink floating over a linear red scrawl—is propped up on an easel, in the pony’s view.

It had been Marti’s idea to put the painting there. Her thought was that the painting might inspire the pony’s healing, remind him of what he needed to get back to. Marti is one-half of Heart’s Journey, the founder and CEO. She’s the emotive one, the one whose mascara is forever running down her face (why does she even wear it?) as she weeps in empathy over an equine’s pain. She’s forty-seven, with the rough look of someone with a past—drugs, spousal abuse, jail time—all this seems inherent in the cut of her Carharts, the crispy taper of her long hair, the tremulous wrinkles that seem to rotate around her mouth as she speaks in that confidential half-whisper, as if she were in hiding with whoever is listening. She seems threadbare, fragile, ready to break down or apart, yet she is so at home at the edge of ruin that she seems interred there, no closer to destruction than she is from health. She is sitting on a grain sack in the feed room.

Her partner, Judy, is picking up all the medical flotsam that has washed up by the pony, as if he were the rocky shore of a toxic sea. She kicks the dog away from a bloody wad of gauze; she rolls up the Vetwrap, she combines two nearly empty bottles of iodine. She picks up several syringes and fans them in her hand, as if their needles must be kept apart, then drops them all in the coffee-can for sharps. Judy is forty-two; like a twelve-year-old girl left in the elements for the thirty years, she is faded with faint cracks for smile-lines, but her childhood form is essentially unchanged, right down to the sloppy long hair and perky joint-floppiness that marks her movement. Unlike Marti, she seems fresh and healthful; she speaks with an insistent but soft voice, as if she knows her good common sense is disruptive enough and aims to dampen its inherent blows. Often she is the one pulling friends and family back from excess or irrationality; she is that steadying hand on your shoulder before you do something rash. She cleans up around the pony and whistles in a strained and breathy way, like someone who has never really learned how. The barn is very quiet, apart from the padding of the dogs, the sighs and shifts of the pony, the occasional plop of loose stool from him, which hits the aisle with a wet hiss.

II

Two vets are heading towards Heart’s Journey. One is Dr. Jim, from Coldwater, a sixty-year-old large-animal vet who graduated from the land-grant college way back. He is extremely tall, with a concave thinness, like a sail full of wind. His hair is mostly white and his face has a grim, angular look whenever he is serious, yet he rarely is. Most often, he’s making smooth, small jokes to put people—taciturn farmers, waitresses, strangers waiting in a long line at the bank—at ease. He climbs into his truck with the faded decal of the longhorn (though there are none in the area), turns the key and smiles when an old George Jones song comes on. In the back of the truck, a canister of bull semen bounces, like an antsy child, as he eases over the dirt roads leading to Heart’s Journey. He had to leave his dinner for this call, push his chair away from the peach cobbler and pull on his boots with all the eyelets. As he laced up, his wife wrapped his pie slice in tinfoil, and asked where he was going. “To see to the crazy ladies’ horses,” he’d said, and she nodded. She has never been in the habit of asking further questions.

Dr. Jim drives by several farms he does business with—the Skitema Dairy, the Yoder’s pig operation, and a smattering of small farms and 4-H’ers he seasonally visits. It is a cool day for early September, and the clumped beef cattle in the field resemble a large dark hand softly gripping the hilltop, like a father steering a toddler by the head. He needs to drop the semen off there on his way back from Heart’s Journey. Out of the rabbit hole and onto solid ground. Heart’s Journey—with its silly hand painted sign, water troughs full of organic herbs and flowers, horses limping around the fields, and pair of unmarried hippy owners—it was about as far from John Lidden’s beef operation as you could get. Two women staggering around in rose-colored glasses, believing every beat-to-hell old horse farted rainbows. Still, there was something he liked about the place in spite of himself.

III

Dr. Merrill is also on his way to Heart’s Journey. He is forty-nine years old, and the lead veterinarian at EquiPerformance, LLC. He rarely makes farm calls these days, and his assistant, Susan, seems startled when he says where he’s heading. Horse owners usually come to the clinic, driving up in diamond chromed gooseneck rigs with matching trucks. On most days, a fancy horse—a dressage warmblood, a jumper, a Quarter Horse reiner, so muscled and slick it looks like rumpled silk—would trot on the pavement strip, while he squinted to see any syncopation in the gait. Even when the irregularity was imperceptible, the owners wanted a full workup. Dr. Merrill would snap the films up onto the lighted wall, gesturing at the blurred margin of a tendon, the slightly abnormal angle of a coffin bone, the compressed space in a joint capsule. Many of his cases involve vague complaints that sap a performance horse’s brilliance: a short stride, a stiff jump, a sticky turn, all well short of an actual limp.

He instills hope in horse owners by hunkering down a bit, like a chummy waiter, and offering up a menu of edgy treatments: shock-wave, stem-cell, Aqua-tred etc. He reminds his clients that there are options—there are almost always options, things to try—and his looks seem to second him. His eyes are wide set and show a lot of very bright white, so that his hazel irises appear to be sinking in milk. A bunched brow undercuts this babyish feature, as if his eyes were pulling towards each other, like drops of water on a tabletop laboring to flow together. His hair is youthfully tousled, his neck is loose, his ears are tight and thinly veined as buds, his form is hard and thin, and gives the sense of being whittled away from something larger.

Heart’s Journey is few towns away, and Dr. Merrill merges onto the highway. The landscape is so bleary and overcast that the road seems hyper-real. It reminds him of bad cartoons, where the main characters and scenes are crisp and bright, while everything beyond is summed up in a few sloppy, gesturing lines. Still, he is glad to push off the day’s appointments. And the idea of the scruffy barn dogs and tame chickens swarming about his legs sounds nice, right about now. He’ll show them, today, that he remembers their names. The bantam, for instance, is Oscar . . .

IV

It says something about you, the vet you choose. Early on, the two women chose vets like spouses choose sides of beds. They needed a vet almost monthly—for routine shots and for the problems the rescue horse usually brought with them. Marti preferred Dr. Merrill—a vet who seemed a connoisseur of equine pain, able to treat it, Marti thought, because he knew all its guises. When he recommended a course of treatment, he spoke in a low, emphatic voice, full of caution and caveats, as if he were revealing some difficult private knowledge. It was that sense of painful confession, married with his intense bedside manner, that made Marti feel at home.

For Judy, it was Dr. Jim, the cut-up country vet with the habit of slapping the horses’ hindquarters, like a car hood, when he was done with them. He blurts out his diagnoses and waves his hands whenever the women ask for more specifics, as if details are an indulgence he is withholding for their own good. The particularly sorry cases—the really broken-down horses—he has little patience for. “Best to let them move along,” he says, his euphemism for euthanasia, as if they were already passing by on a conveyer. There is something honest, Judy thought, in his refusal to get caught up in anything murky.

Inevitably, the two women see a character flaw, made manifest, in the other women’s vet preference. Marti can see that, despite her practical airs, Judy is a woman afraid to delve into real troubles, to live with unknown outcomes. Judy, watching Marti and Dr. Merrill speak nearly check-to-check over some sketchy diagnostic, sees a woman who needs coddling, who relishes the minutia of sickness under the guise of trying to heal it.

V

Over the barn, there is a bridge, a large bright-banded arch, as noxious as corporate branding, a design bandied about in a boardroom. The bridge is self-contained; it is like a piece of garden décor that can be repositioned wherever it looks best, it performs no function other than to imitate a bridge, to give a sense of crossing. This is the Rainbow Bridge, and it is referenced often by Marti and Judy as if it were as solid as the feed store down the street. The Rainbow Bridge is animal rescuer parlance for the interfaith zone where dead animals go, the sphere where old, unsteady horses are restored to an eternal youth. Pet dogs, who lived in different decades and never crossed paths on earth, quaff each other’s buttocks in the sky. Cats cash in their unused lives for cloud perches near the sun. Or some such thing.

The Bridge comes up between the women with some regularity. They’ve kept horses from it and sent horses to it. They’ve pulled horses off the slaughter trucks, they’ve outbid the kill-buyers at Shipshewana, they’ve carefully rehabbed starvation cases and neglect cases, calling the farrier in to trim the long, curled hoofs (like elfin slippers) on some of the worst. They’ve also had to put a fair amount of horses down—Raven with the ulcerated, cancerous eye; Henry with the inoperable colic; the deformed colt Jet who walked on his pasterns; the old mare Olena whose ringbone and navicular kept her down so long she developed bedsores. Then there was Yankee, the off-track Thoroughbred who flipped over under tack twice, nearly killing Marti. A particularly troubling case, as he was young and beautiful and completely deadly.

VI

Before he left the office for Heart’s Journey, Dr. Merrill asked Susan to cancel his appointment with his client Deborah and her mare, Luna. Luna is lame again, this time in the hind end. Before it was the left fetlock. Before that, a string of abscesses kept her out of commission for the better part of six months. Before that, she bowed a tendon. Before that, she popped a splint. There is a before that, but Dr. Merrill likes to pretend the mare has just appeared to him, in the hopes that he could view her present problem, whatever it is, with fresh eyes.

The mare is tall, and chestnut, with an excessive femininity to her face—long lashes, big quivery eyes, fine ears, and a buttery muzzle. Deborah has the same kind of look, with jutting plump lips that seem to tussle, as if trying to playfully mount one another. She listens to Dr. Merrill and nods her head. Sometimes she voices a doubt—would Luna ever be right?—and blushes. Of course, Dr. Merrill would answer, and Deborah would go brighter and look down, as if her question were evidence of a small-minded faithlessness, and not a reasonable question, considering. And they would move on to the next treatment.

This has gone on for almost six years. Nothing in Luna’s radiographs, or x-rays, or bone scans, or ultrasounds, or blood panel has ever indicated anything beyond a minor problems and good prognoses, so he never tells Deborah bad news. Nothing that has been wrong with the mare is unfixable, so Dr. Merrill fixes each thing. But the mare will not stay sound. After two months of being ridden, she’s now dragging a toe around turns.

The woman has aged over those six years. He has, he thinks to himself, watched her ripen then go oversweet on the vine. The lips got dewier, the eyes mistier, the clothing brighter, the figure fuller, so that during a certain appointment—perhaps when they injected the mare’s hocks—Deborah was glaringly lovely, a nearly painful concentration of beauty. Seeing her made his teeth hurt, as if he had bitten into something too rich. He concentrated on her shoes—soft leather ankle boots, ill-suited to a barn—and sent her on her way, with a breezy comment that he hoped to see neither of them anytime soon (since the mare would so soon be well!).

The next time he saw them, or the time after that, Deborah’s skin was heavier. The red waves of her hair were dry and compressed into a clip on top of her head, like leaves flattened in a compost bag. The large wet mouth on the slackened face looked pathological, seductiveness flaring like a growth. The horse still stood at the end of its rope and blinked its fawn-eyes, then limped its little limp as Deborah led her into a jog. She’d stopped the horse and looked at Dr. Merrill with the shamed-hopeful look of a kid pulling back elastic to show a glimpse of genitals to a playground pal. It was obstinate and imploring—I dare you to say it’s okay.

He patted her back. They bent over readouts and shared breath. Assistants shuffled in the hall; he saw the shadowy blips of their shoes under the door, like flickering ellipses. Even as he murmured assurances he stared at the image, feeling, for not the first time that it was secretly enchanted, like those joke-portraits whose eyes move as you walk by. The image was pristine, textbook; the lesions and edemas blinked into view the minute he looked away. The horse is healthy. The horse is not well. Deborah smelled gamey, and he found himself rubbing her hair absently, like he would a horse. Just a small problem, here, that’s all.

Yes, good to get away.

VII

Judy wants to be blue. Everything in her midst seems blue. There’s blue print on the bottle of bute. There’s a blue plush goat in the stall bars, and the Vet-wrap securing the fraying bottom of Snippet’s cast is blue. The sky outside the open barn doors, though it had been overcast for a week, is now a shocking shade of azure, bright even where the sun is not. Even the gray tomcat, who caterwauls high in the hayloft, looks bluish as he flicks his tail over a bar of light reaching through the eaves.

Judy had taken the True Colors personality assessment earlier that week; it had been free for the heads of local businesses (I run a nonprofit, she’d said). She was sure she’d be a blue (caring, creative, intuitive), but instead the results of the test had pegged her a green (analytical, logical, emotionally detached) and although the facilitators made clear there were “not bad colors,” Judy knew all she needed to know from the other greens she’d been grouped with.

To her left, a realtor woman with a drippy spray tan complained about the buzz of the fluorescent lights. To her right the owner of a cheese shop droned on about her warring skin diseases, how one rash actually healed the other, clearly oblivious to the discomfort of her listeners. Judy looked at blue group across the room. They clustered around their table like bright birds at a birdbath, tittering with excitement, stretching up to flutter their colors—all beautiful and exotic—one woman bounced in her chair, her red hair in a chignon like a curled feather. They laughed, they spoke earnestly and quickly; to Judy they looked like artists transported from an earlier age, writers in a jazz club, something like that. I used to be that way, she thought. What happened?

Snippet is dozing, jerking in his sleep. The tips of his suspended hooves scrape the pavement, throwing off a spark. Judy puts her hand on him, under his thick striped mane. She lays her face against his neck, feeling his long guard hairs, the vestiges of his winter coat that would have been fully shed out if Snippet were able to roll in the sand, or if he were up to being curried. But he is a horse that hates being brushed, hates typical gestures of affection, really, and normally Judy’s proximity would have caused him to dance sidewise, to perhaps nip at her coat, to roll his large black eye, so the white sclera showed, so that he looked skeptical and affronted, although Judy always got the sense it was a put-on, and that Snippet merely liked to play with expectations.

Which was why, when your back was to him, he would sometimes put his muzzle on your shoulder and nibble very lightly. But when you turned around, he’d gallop off with a squeal, so you were left wondering at his intent: was the closeness the point, and the wheeling away just a way to maintain his toughness, a kind of embarrassed back-pedaling? Or was the wheeling away the point, and the moment of closeness just a joke, just a commentary on how willing you were to believe in his affection, how vulnerable and dense you are?

VIII

Dr. Jim is a few miles from Heart’s Journey. He’s turned off the radio. He’s thinking of the pony’s radiographs, and he’s following what he considers to be a foolish train of thought. He doesn’t look at many x-rays in his practice and he felt bizarrely charmed when he slid them out of the mailer the other day. The pony’s cannon bone—split white against the gray fuzz of the surrounding tissue—looked to him like a thin woman in a white shift, turning away from the camera. A high, small bone chip appeared to be the barest suggestion of a fine upturned nose, lost in the angling of her cheek. An oddly romantic image, like a snip of film from an old silent picture.

Of course he’ll recommend euthanasia—nothing else makes sense. The pony is just a pet, but his advice would be the same even if it were a pricey herd bull. He has his kit with him and is prepared to put the pony down on the spot.

He is driving slower and slower. The dirt roads, at dinner time, are nearly empty and his truck crawls. The films are in a sleeve on his passenger side. He reaches over and taps them out, idly, as if by accident. The image slides out. The woman, again. The crack in the bone is like a sash at her waist. What if he tried to fix the pony? His friends, the cattlemen, would rib him at the diner. They’d laugh and say he’d gone soft in the head, give him shit about retiring. His wife would shake her head, in amusement or dismissal, he wouldn’t know. His son would bark a laugh, bits of sausage and milk spritzing the table cloth.

The break was open, but the bony column was aligned. The pony was small—500 pounds—that was key. What about a weight-bearing cast with longitudinal support? A sort of standing splint? He stops the truck and feels behind his seat. He lays the tire iron on the radiograph.

IX

Marti is in the feed room. The bag she sits on bulges, and kernels work their way out of the plastic weave. Mumu, the obese calico, is curled on another bag, kneading and purring, rolling her head around, wishing to be touched. Marti wants a cigarette, but she quit. She wants a drink, but she quit that, too. She wants to leave the barn and go to Rosco’s, dance with Jim, argue with the bartender, drive by the street she used to live on, write a letter to her first foster family, smoke a joint, shout at someone, try on a dress for someone, sleep on a floor, wake up someplace else, but she quit all that, too.

She’s always had a lot of wants. It used to be she felt all of them, the way one feels each staggered drop right when it begins to rain. Then they became a weather, nothing to blink at.

With a piece of hay, she digs at the crescents of dirt under her fingernails. She hears Snippet struggle in the sling and Judy’s voice quieting him. She should go out there and help her, discuss what should be done with the pony, but she doesn’t feel up to it.

She squeezes her eyes shut and watches the pops of yellow and red, the light show playing in the dark. Those flashes of light—ghosts of light she’d seen, no doubt, the shapes of lamp light and bare bulbs like a visual echo—she bore down on them as if they were concealing something. They were bright shards of some other place, she always thought as a kid, evidence of another world peeping through. Her stepfather once pushed her down and her head hit a planter. Her ears hummed, and the light she saw was varied and streaky, as if she were being drawn through a nighttime cityscape on the back of speeding motorcycle. It wasn’t heavenly or spiritual, really—it lacked the solemnity—but wildly festive. It seemed more real than her stepfather or the push; both the man and the act struck her as chintzy in comparison, no longer substantial enough to fear. Even as he bent over her and begged her to be okay, rocking and holding her hand, she wondered if he knew he was barely there.

A chicken wanders into the room, moving to the beat of its clucks, turning its head and giving her a deeply skeptical look, its ruff of red-gold feathers fissuring as it drops its head to peck at the floor. Marti reaches down and brushes her fingers over his comb; it feels to her like a limp doll hand.

X

The thing he had to do, he knew, was to cut Deborah off. Tell her that, given Luna’s long history of problems, that she was probably just prone to unsoundness and the best thing would be to make her a broodmare or a pasture pet. Just cut it off. The whole thing kept shaking him up; sometimes he came home so distracted that his wife and young son seemed to be just so much subclinical white noise, a side project he’d unwisely taken on. Laura would sometimes ask him what was wrong, looping her arms around his neck. All he could manage to say was that his mind was on a “hard case.”

He couldn’t tell her about Luna—he was loath to admit his obsession with the case, the lack of progress. There were far more dramatic cases that he could have on his mind, cases he did tell Laura about—a dicey colic surgery on a big time jumper, a degloved pastern freed from barbed wire, barely salvaged, a breech birth unable to be righted. And of course he told her about Snippet, the miniscule pony with the catastrophically shattered leg.

“Is that the one who paints?” she’d said, and he’d looked at her blankly before remembering that yes, the two women had taught the pony to slop paint around. He and Laura had been watching the news when a local interest story on Snippet and Heart’s Journey came on. In the clip, Judy and Marti handed a brush to the pony, who took it in his teeth then flung his head up and down, like an athlete making theater out of working a kink out of his neck. Paint spritzed on the women and the newscaster, an effusive woman with a smile so high and wide it showed all her gums, as if her upper lip were the corner of a yogurt lid, there for ease of peeling.

“That pony’s hilarious,” Laura remarked. She was in fact eating a yogurt on the couch next to him—she was always watching her weight and working out—and her trimness had a parched, vacuum-packed quality, like a foodstuff that would need reconstituting with water to be palatable. His attraction to her had dribbled away as his practice became more consuming, but it struck him not as a loss but as a practical shift, the way you might rehab a horse with sore front heels by developing the carrying power of his hocks and hind end.

On the TV, Snippet was creating a swirl of blotchy colors, his tail a counterweight to the brush, swishing left when he made a right stroke, flagged when he dropped his head and stabbed at the bottom of the canvas. The camera flicked to Marti and Judy, who looked especially eccentric in the studio lights; even with the camera makeup and hair they looked like drifters, gaping at some rare vision unfolding down by the overpass.

The donkey farm on his right tells him he’s a mile or so out from Heart’s Journey. Snippet hadn’t been responding well to the soft cast and the sling, the next step, if there was a next step, would be a table surgery and then a long, long rehab—at least a year, with much of that time tranquillized to prevent the animal from thrashing around and blowing out the pins from his bones. A twenty percent chance of recovery, if that. Normally he’d go for it if they would—which they would, at least if the same woman—was it Martina?—was at the helm. He recalled a hushed conversation with her in the tack room; her swimmy eyes searching his, translating all his nuance into two words: hope or hopeless.

He cringes at the thought of it—another vortex. He ought to just recommend euthanasia and be done with it. The afternoon sun moves through the cab of his truck like a hand feeling for something lost. It sets on the chrome details of his bag, where two files are tucked away—one for Snippet and one for Luna. If he puts Snippet down today—or just gives his recommendation and leaves—he can get back to the office and perhaps Deborah can come to later appointment. There, he will let her know . . .

Dr. Merrill looks at his bag, the tongue of light on the left handle. Luna’s latest radiograph flicks across his mind unbidden, as it often does. The black and grey fuzz of the image seems to crackle and squirm in his thoughts, as if he were in the process of tuning it in, moving rabbit ears to catch a signal that floats enticingly near. Something in the angle of the pedal bone . . . ? Not that it matters. No harm, though, in looking at the radiograph one more time, just to confirm.

XI

The problem is Marti. Being around that women had changed her, made her harder, turned her green. Marti is so delicate, so emotional, that Judy had to be strong and coldly logical just to keep some semblance of order around the farm. Marti’s whole personality is like a sculpture Judy has once seen of small, very thin reeds, fed into each other to make a latticework so fragile that it had to be protected from even the breath of the gallery-goers. It was in a glass case, in shadow, since light would degrade the organic material. Judy spent a long time staring at it, trying to figure out what, exactly, was holding it up. It was half-collapsed, even, so how . . . ? She’d looked at her program. The integrity of the piece depends on the forces of gravity bearing down; it gathers strength as it falls into itself . . .

Judy always has to do the dirty work: to turn away a horse from the rescue (otherwise they’d become hoarders—something Marti certainly was before Judy came on board), to cease treatment of a too-far-gone horse, to make the call to send a horse to the Rainbow Bridge, to hold the horse’s lead rope while the vet administered the shot. How many lead ropes had she held in this way? How many times did she gently tug down on the rope, encouraging the horse, even as he blinked out of existence, to fold his front legs, so he would settle down gracefully, rather than simply fall onto his side, convulsing and struggling, far from the peaceful sendoff everyone wanted? And in these cases—when the horse left violently, messily, sometimes banging himself in the head, spraying blood through a smashed nasal cavity—how many times had she wanted someone there, to comfort her? She wants to tell Marti about these times—Marti should at least hear it—but she doesn’t.

There is something about Marti that forces a person to tread carefully. She seems flayed, like some sort of raw nerve flailing around in the world, and her pain seems elevated, deeper, more keenly and destructively felt. It is actually less painful, for Judy, to keep a sad image to herself then to risk Marti becoming upset. It is a kind of power, Judy thinks, to be so vulnerable. Sometimes she wonders if it’s a kind of manipulation, too.

For once, Judy thinks, I want to be the irrational one. I’ll be the one who can’t let go. I’ll call that whack job Dr. Merrill for once. I’ll keep Snippet going; I’ll throw the rescue’s money at him. We’ll do surgery. Surgeries. Why not? He’s a great pony. Why can’t I lose my shit for once?

She wants to return to the illogic at the base of the enterprise, when they stood among all kill buyers, the slaughter-truck drivers, the farmers with the Skoal-can circles on their back pockets, the married Amish men with their heavy beards, gravely nodding, as if speech itself is too new-fangled. The auctioneer, all chin and bald head, compresses and fans out his syllables in a showboating blurt, like a shuffler makes an arc of his cards. And then, without even looking at Judy, Marti raises her hand. The auctioneer eyes her and nods. The men turn their heads and take her in: her stained Carharts, her long blond hair, the hardship-scored face with the stunned child-eyes. Some laugh, some grumble. The two women pull their pony—hip #467— from the pen. He is so thin and his coat so poor that he looks like a rug-remnant tossed over a wrought iron fence. His forelock is stiff with cockleburs and stands straight up like a plume; despite his condition he wears it that way, like he knows he is something to see. The two women lead him out, whooping and laughing, giddy with the absurdity of what they’ve taken on.

XII

The last time he fashioned a medical device he used a bamboo flute and a ripped shirt. The solider was in so much pain he’d bit a hole in his lip. He pressed the flute to the boy’s shin, tore up his undershirt, wrapped it around and held the excess in his teeth to keep the tension, then tied it off. “Don’t run off or the wind will make your leg whistle.” Dr. Jim never joked crudely, nor swore, nor made coarse comments about women, nor employed gallows humor. He was an oddity in the barracks, and while the other men made fun of him often (his nickname was Norman Rockwell) they saw the resilience and subversion in his simple sunny jokes. “Goddamn you, Rockwell,” the boy had said, grimacing as Dr. Jim pulled him to his feet.

When he makes a comment to cut the tension, he likes to watch how it falls on the atmosphere, much like a golfer shades his eyes and traces the trajectory of his shot. The tense, silent people at the bank, for instance, ripple and shift, rolling their eyes, chuckling or smiling tightly. These slight movements break up the scene suddenly and dramatically; it is like a shattered pane of glass finally buckling into millions of shards. They can no longer be a line of silent strangers.

He is joking with himself, these thoughts of trying to fix the pony. He’d have to make this drive over and over to work on the patient. Probably he would work in a haze of incense,

Marti or Judy (he never remembered who was who) would talk to him about the pony’s feelings and thoughts, he would be made to contemplate the pony’s paintings, and the pony itself would wobble around, comically debased in the walking cast he’d cook up in his basement shop. He looks at the film again. He thinks of the simplicity of the splint; how easy it would be to try. The look of the cattlemen when they find out.

XIII

The aisle is quiet, and Marti ventures out. Judy is out riding the Gator, tossing flakes of hay over the pasture fences while the horses gallop around. Snippet dozes, the white Medicine Hat marking over his ears bright in the afternoon light, like a fresh doily on a worn couch. She pats him, studies one of paintings, his last before the accident. Most of his paintings were sloppy, flung over the whole canvas and beyond, but this one is comprised of just a few frilly disks of paint, pressed over each other, as symmetrical as if it had been made with a spirograph. It looks familiar, somehow, and then she remembers where she’d seen something like it before.

Marti’s foster mother Gwen used to wear a silk flower like that, every day, pinned to her headband, her scarves, or the hem of her shorts if it were hot out. It was blue and green and cheaply made with a fake pearl in the center, but Gwen never went without it. Once, Marti had gotten lost in an outdoor market, a swirling place chocked with wares of all kinds: herbs, blown glass, collectible pins, handmade clothes, etc. She’d wandered away from Gwen to look at a table covered with tumbled stones. The man explained the powers of each one: the flecks of bright in the pyrite refreshed one’s courage, while rosy quartz, held to one’s temple, could catch the thoughts of others and refract them into your head. He leaned over the table, took her by her wrist, and tried to place a magnetic bracelet on her. His grip was wet, his eyes pink rimmed, and a winter hat with leaping deer was pulled low on his gray head, though it was June. She jerked back and realized Gwen was nowhere in sight.

In the haze and heat she walked, looking for her foster mother, trying not to walk in circles, though she kept seeing the same blond women and their clumps of reed baskets, swaying in the sun. She looked for Gwen’s feet in their simple Greek sandals, or her streaming scarves, but there were many scarves and feet. Panic hit her. She had the awful feeling that this market was the whole of her existence now, and that she’d be walking by these glass unicorns and bowls of beads forever. But then she saw, through the indeterminate mix of bare legs and colors, Gwen’s perpetual flower. She saw it long before she saw Gwen; it was as if the flower were a prick of light that opened to reveal Gwen, its petals an aperture.

She hasn’t thought about Gwen in a long time. The flower’s appearance on the canvas again suggested a keyhole to another place, and she remembers that Gwen used to say that she was an Indigo Child, possessed of a heightened vision and aura. No one else said that about her, so when Gwen got sick and Marti was moved to a new home, she tried to forget it. Auras and visions would not have played well in her second home, that is for sure.

She puts a hand on the painting and a hand on Snippet’s sleeping forehead. She shuts her eyes. A tingle runs through her like a thread; it feels irritatingly minute, like a hair in your mouth. Gwen always talked about the inner eye, how it opened, blinked, and fluttered in response to the vibrations of emotions. Hers had snapped open. Snippet wants to go, she thinks. He wants to slip into the opening he made and enter the new place. She would call Dr.

Jim, make herself hold the rope for once, and see.

XIV

To live in a horse’s body is to experience a perpetual loop of sensation, as if each nerve ending is being plucked in a pattern. Sometimes the patterns change or stutter—this is thought. Normally you feel the hair at the base of your tail twice, then the inside of your esophagus, now the order is switched and that has meaning. Then, of course, there are the eyes, set on the side of the head. It is like being at a themed ride at an amusement park; everything to the side is thrilling and bright, but the area right in front of the car is black. Your world is peripheral. The blind spot in the center of your vision is your center, dark and certain, a void you can retreat to whenever you want. Sometimes the people and buildings and grass and pasture fold over you and push you into that center; you are like a stone held secret in a fist. At these times, your sovereignty becomes a question, a source of suspicion, a mystery. People holler at you and peer in your eyes with a bright light, trying to see if you are still there.

 

 

Monica McFawn‘s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, Gargoyle, and others. Her story collection, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, from which this piece was taken, won the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and will be published by UGA press in 2014. Besides writing fiction, she recently completed a play and is at work on a screenplay. She teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. When she isn’t writing or teaching, she can usually be found at the barn, training her Welsh pony cross, Eragon, in dressage and jumping.

 

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