The Mare

Velvet

That night I couldn’t sleep. Everything in me was still going too fast. Also, my stomach felt sick from the food at the restaurant, like I might have to go to the bathroom. I thought about my mom, especially her cooking, how you could feel her in her cooking. I thought about my horse: her rough mane, her powerful shoulders. Her wise wrinkled mouth. Her thinking dark eye. I sat up and turned on the light. I took my cotton-ball box out of my backpack and laid my things out on the blanket: the plastic bell, the red heart, my father’s blue shell, my grandfather’s sea horse, my one-legged Ginger-doll in her checkered coat and her orange ring. I put my new ring in with them. I thought of my horse. My grandfather said, Go.

So I made sure their lights were out and then I got out of bed and put on my butterfly ring and my clothes. I went downstairs really quiet and out the door quiet too. I walked on the dark path to the barn. I would’ve been scared normally, but that night I wasn’t. I wasn’t scared even when I went into the barn and it was so dark at first I couldn’t see at all. The horses moved and asked me to come say hi, and the fast thing in my body got slower. I didn’t talk to anybody else, I just went to her. She was curled on the floor of her stall, her head even curled down with her nose resting on the floor like some little animal. When she felt me there she raised her head; I spoke soft to her and she uncurled to stand and come to me.

When horses are curled up and then they stand, it is beautiful and funny, like babies walking. They put their front feet down like it’s the first time and they don’t know for sure how, they need to go slow and feel on each foot, their body going one way and the other until they find the strong spot and boom, they are proud on their legs again. Watching made my heart soft, made me want to hug her. So I did something I never did; I opened her stall and came in it.

Which I should not have done. She wasn’t expecting it, and she came to me too fast. I held up my hand like I saw Pat do and I said, “Alto!” like my mom when she means business. And the mare stopped. And I made my head and shoulders soft. I petted her, first her shoulder, then her neck. I told her how much I’d missed her and promised I’d clean her stall the next day because I could smell it was mad dirty. I tried to sing her a Christmas carol but I couldn’t remember all of one, so I sang, Safe under mama’s wings, huddling up / Sleep the little chicks until the next day. I sang it to her until the fast thing was gone. And then when I walked out, I sang it so they could all hear it.