So young, and the world was young with us and offered nothing to guide us. The car bumped along a dark winter road and we bumped along inside it. We only touched by accident. Streets passed without street signs, without streetlights, no lights at all but the stars in the sky. Once I would have loved getting lost with him. Now I watched the gas gauge nervously, pulled at the seatbelt that dug into my shoulder. The radio faded between stations. The only part of the car that worked reliably was the heat, blasting a dragon’s breath of stale popcorn and skunked beer. I cracked my window, wiped the fogged glass with my jacket sleeve. Dark shapes passed, as if the whole town was sleeping, and then I saw a house all alive and brightly lit. Doors open to the night, flooded with orange light. A barn, and inside the shape of a horse.
Stop, I said, and the man I wouldn’t marry laughed, asked if I wanted to ask the horse for directions. And I did. I had never wanted anything so hard in my life as I wanted to leap from the car and run to that lighted barn. Whatever that horse told me, I would believe him.
The man I wouldn’t marry kept driving. Eventually, we found a ramp for the highway. A highway he would take in another direction someday, with a woman who wasn’t me. I don’t remember the day he left. I don’t remember our last fight. I only remember that night. How lost I felt. I remember the wanting. The campfire glow of that doorway, like it was there to welcome me home. A dark night, a lonely barn. A horse in the moonlight, waiting.
Kathryn Kulpa is a writer, editor, and librarian with work in Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions. She is a 2025 writer-in-residence at Linden Place in Bristol, RI, where she hopes to grapple with the ghosts of history.
