The Mare

Velvet

One day when Gare was eating her sandwich on the feedbag, I was going past her on the way to the house for lunch, and she said, “Hey.”

I stopped and looked.

“Heather’s a cunt, right?”

I just looked at her.

“Calling her horse Totally Crushed?”

I stayed quiet, looking.

“She told me she wanted to call her Totally Fucking Crushed, but they wouldn’t let her register the horse that way. Duh.”

I said, “Why did she want to call her horse that?”

“Fuck if I know. It sounds like nail polish or something.”

“It don’t sound like nail polish. It sounds like she hates her horse.”

“I dunno.” She looked down and ate her sandwich. She looked up again. “You don’t curse, do you?”

I said, “No.” I thought about her saying I was gonna get deported. I thought, I could curse you out so hard, you’d fall down.

“Why not? Don’t you think it’s cool?”

“No,” I said. “I think it’s stupid.” But I sat on the feedbag with her anyway. We didn’t really look at each other.

She said, “Are you in a gang?”

I looked out at the paddock and at the path going out into the meadow beyond. But I was seeing the street where I lived, and the word almost faded off the wall: Cookie. I thought about him giving my brother some cookie. I thought about the man reaching up to touch his name on the wall. Some kind of feeling came up in me. And I said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m in a gang.”

“Awesome,” said Gare. “I wish they had gangs here.”