The Mare

Silvia

She came back in and the night was like always. Lying in bed but feeling like I’m walking in mud up to my chest with Dante in my arms and Velvet on my back like a monkey, with her hands around my neck going mami this, mami that. Street noise keeping me awake, music, people yelling, strings of angry words I don’t know except money and bitch and money. Money, always money. I can’t get enough shifts, and they say they’ll turn the lights off if I don’t pay. I can’t pay, if I do there won’t be enough for rent. I’m supposed to send money for my sister in DR. I’m supposed to make cookies for a sale at the school. The only thing that makes me feel better is talking to the one person who’s really my friend, a black woman named Rasheeda who even speaks Spanish. And I can’t go to her now because her pregnant daughter tested positive for HIV and now she won’t even talk to Rasheeda; how can I come to her with my problems?

I turn on my back for just a moment. Dante stirs. I think, Just a minute. Just a minute away from him and from her, remembering: my father’s soft cheek at night, the smell of his body, tobacco and sweat. The time I went to a party when the hostess had a tray of prizes for the kids, and I reached up to it and got a tiny doll with no face in a big dress. The horses walking in the street; the horse.

I rode a horse when I was six. Because my father was friends with Mr. Reyes, the man who ran a store down the street, and Mr. Reyes had a horse. One day my father held me up so I could see the horse’s face, and he had rough skin but soft eyes. I put my hands on his neck and it felt good. I wanted to get up on him, so my father laughed and put me on his back. And on that horse I saw the world: sky, trees, buildings, streets going in different directions. My life, going in different directions. My father was talking to Mr. Reyes with his hand on the horse; it was right by my leg. But then he turned and his hand came off the horse. And the horse began to move! He walked and then Mr. Reyes yelled and the horse ran, and the world was shaken so hard my teeth rattled. I grabbed the mane and watched the world clatter by, I clattered by my mother running out the house waving a towel. Somebody stood in front of the horse, and it reared up and I fell off. I banged my head; it felt like all my bones broke. I cried, Mami! A dark hole closed over me and I fell down into it.

In the hole people were yoked to machines, thousands of people, naked, bent, and pulling, so angry that they bit the shoulders of those before them. Voices said, “You are lazy and selfish”; the voices came from faces joined together in a breathing darkness, one dark, expressionless face made of many faces, a black field of nose-holes, eye-holes, and many mouths. People fell down the slippery holes and mouths and into working guts; they were shit out into dreams of people who did not even know them. I was there, with the shit-people. We crawled in the dirt of dreams, the dreams of those who cursed us without knowing us. Above were signs, telling us what we were: crosses, dollars, flashing lights, thousands of quick-moving pictures showing pain and ugliness.

And then my mother grabbed me up by my arm and slapped me awake, crying. My father said, “It’s not her fault!” but still she got me home and whipped my legs. Later, my father got me a piece of candy.

Now he’s gone. When he died I could not even be with him to say good-bye because I had no money to get on the plane.