reckonedabandon.

Spring rolled ‘round midway through March but it was still a little cold. There was no longer need for big, heavy coats but petty old winter still clung to gusts of wind and bit at my face. It was grey always and rained at least a bit most days. I could feel tiny droplets hitting against my forehead while I walked through the prairie. The grass was fairly short and only reached up to my ankles odd. Sometimes it would scratch at my skin but when it was all wet and limp I could walk all over it with no retaliation. On wet days like this one I wore big black wellington boots, though by the time I got home they’d usually been spattered brown with mud. 

I was heading down to the river like I did every day. I wanted to see the horses. Wild horses were common to this part of the state and around this river in particular. They’d come down for a drink. Usually in groups of four or five. 

In my purse I had just my sketchbook, pencil, and a lunch. Every day I’d come down near the river and draw the horses. I didn’t have a cell phone or any computers or television sets. Drawing was all I did, really. I was old now. Retired.

I lived in a little cottage on the prairie. Once every two weeks I’d wake up early, walk down to the road, get in my car, and drive into town for groceries and the like. That was effectively the only human contact I had and I talked as little as possible to the townsfolk. I wasn’t married and I didn’t have any children, friends, or pets. I had little family left, too, save for my sister who I’d last seen thirteen years prior at my parents’ funeral. My mother died of stomach cancer and my father killed himself two days after. They were buried together.

I had designed my life so that I could be left entirely alone with my horses.

I arrived at my usual place. There was a wooden chair there I had dragged all the way from home. When I first started sketching the horses a few years ago, I thought it would be healthier to stand the whole time but I was too old for it then and I was older now. No one ever came around here so I didn’t need to worry about anyone stealing it. Sometimes an animal would knock it over, though, and I’d put my poor back through Hell bending over to pick it up again. Not today, though. I sat down and pulled out my sketchbook, flipping to the closest blank page. There weren’t any horses yet. That was fine. I had plenty of time. 

It rained, but not badly. I sat and felt the rain against my head and my shoulders. I looked downwards at the green grass below. Drops of water clung to them like little crystals. Where I grew up, it was dryer. The grass was more often brittle and yellow-brown and it made me sad to look at. A drop fell against the back of my neck and trickled down my shirt. I shivered. A low crackle of thunder went off in the distant sky. If the weather worsened into a thunderstorm, my chances of seeing the horses would sink. I shifted the soles of my boots against the grass and the muddy soil below. A worm had come up from below. I strained my back to pick it up and I held the little fellow in my hand. It squirmed a little, blindly. In some ways I envied it. I thought it might be nice to live in the cold earth, away from it all and blind to everything. But then I couldn’t see my horses. I tossed the worm away and discarded the thought. 

Hours passed and I grew hungry. It was 2:30 now and there were no horses yet. This wasn’t entirely unusual, but if they didn’t come out in the next hour or two I’d get worried. I pulled out my lunchbox from my purse. It was plain, undecorated silver metal. Inside was a cucumber and cream-cheese sandwich, cut in halves. Diagonally. I didn’t like cucumber and cream-cheese sandwiches, but I had eaten them often in my youth and they felt to me like an essential picnic snack. I liked the idea of them more than I did the taste, really. They were light, though, and I didn’t have much appetite for anything too rich or hearty these days. As I ate a cucumber slice slipped from between the white bread and landed in the grass below. Flecks of cream-cheese splattered against the blades of grass. I finished, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and returned my lunchbox to my purse. For a moment, holding the lunchbox, I felt very stupid and childish, like a meek little schoolgirl on a field trip. I frowned and tried to brush the feeling away.

When I was a child, my father would often take me to the movies. He had a passion for cinema and was always in between passion-project scripts. He never finished any of them. I did enjoy going to the theatre, but whenever we left I’d feel an overwhelming sense of shame and embarrassment. For those brief few seconds that we walked down the aisle towards the exit, I felt as if the entire audience had shifted their focus from the film to me and that they were laughing at me, at the way I walked or the clothes I was wearing. These moments made up a tiny percent of the entire experience, but they were unpleasant enough that after a while I stopped going to the movies with my dad and he’d go on his own.

I blinked and looked back out at the prairie. There was a horse. It was pitch black and it stood in the distance, though it walked closer. As it did, I noticed a blotch of white in its pattern, beginning at the top of its head and trickling down to its nose, as if a bit of someone else’s cucumber and cream-cheese sandwich had fallen from the sky and stained its face. The nearer it drew, the more apparent its size became to me. It was extraordinarily large, almost twice the size of the other horses I’d usually see around here. Its eyes were deep brown, like swollen chestnuts. It stepped nearer until it was nearly right in front of me. 

I rose and my chair and bones creaked in unison. It lowered its head somewhat and I raised a trembling hand to touch the white patch. For a moment I hesitated. Then, I began stroking it. Its hair was smooth and upon closer inspection I noticed several scattered strings of silver. It was an old animal, like me. I swallowed and it blinked. There were no flies or other such insects fluttering around its eyes or nostrils like they tended to do with the others. In this way, I felt sorry for the horses. It would surely drive me mad, I thought. This horse was different, though. I felt as if there was some holy aspect to it, driving away any vermin.

I stroked it still and, for a moment, I wondered if I was the first one to ever touch this horse, human or otherwise. At first, the thought seemed silly. But then, something in my stomach told me it was true. No horseflies had ever landed on its perfect black coat. No worms had ever been caught under its hooves. It had never mated with another horse, and the others all thought it too strange to ever approach it. 

The horse lifted its head and started to turn around. I stood and watched it walk away into the prairie. It walked a straight line, not straying into the obscured patches of any nearby forest. When it stood before me, it was a colossus. But it grew smaller the further it walked away. Eventually, I could not see it anymore. It was still raining a little and I felt a heavy drop land against my forehead. I never got to draw any horses that day. I packed up my things and went home.