There’s a horse in the field, dead. It’s getting dark. Someone’s placed a rug over the carcass, and left it. As light ebbs, the black rug with the cold shape beneath is becoming identical to the ground.
Driving past the field this morning, I had seen the animal lying stretched on the dew-drenched grass, its nostrils whorling fantastical creatures in the rising fog. It had seemed to me then that the horse was just taking the early streaks of sun. The dawn was a glowing one, the air tender and warm. Don’t horses sometimes do this, lay still. And don’t they also roll onto their backs like pups, kicking fetlocks into the air, pivoting on keen withers, snorting delight, rubbing mohawk manes into the earth.
As I returned homeward this afternoon, I remembered the oddly-sprawled animal, and I stopped at the entrance to the field. It had not moved, but now a Buzz Lightyear duvet stretched from its neck to its hindquarters. As it breathed shallow from a gaping mouth, a young girl stood over, her back to the horse, speaking urgency into her phone. Buzz Lightyear’s slogan ‘To Infinity… and Beyond!’ arched along the animal’s rounded spine. A school scarf was bunched under its head. I drove on.
Before night falls, I walk back to the field. The girl is gone. From the gate, I see that a heavy black rug has been placed, making a rigid parallelogram of the horse. Under the stiff rug, in dim light, I glimpse the duvet still tucked around the animal. The girl’s earlier footprints are embedded in the ground, circling her horse. The deep imprints of her knees are at its head where she had held it for an extended period of time.
First published in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, 2019.
😢
ReplyDelete