Saturday, November 29, 2008

November

With the warmth of a horse underneath me, the funeral-parlor lighting cast by the gathering clouds chills only my fingertips. I can feel my horse’s muscles bunch, his spine curve as he picks up my heading and moves off. I can feel the tension through his shoulders, a shortness of step that tells me he’d rather be running. But where can we run? Penned in by private property and housing developments, the land here has been pettily fenced away.
Rolling landscape, neat shrubs, and evenly spaced electric boxes lay like an architect’s blueprint across farm fields, formerly hardwood forest. With the downturn in the housing market, the newly-cleared lots sit empty. We jog along where the woods meet the neatly mown grass, and Howdy flicks his ears suspiciously. “I see it,” I tell my horse, and we slow to a walk. I hum loudly, and a hunter in a tree stand turns, eyeing us silently for antlers. We have none; his gun remains across his lap.
Howdy would prefer to go left at this junction, but I’m concerned about the line of trees ahead. It seems a likely place for more men with guns. We move away at a long trot and lengthen into a gentle lope.
Our only choice ahead is a subdivision. The private woods are far too dangerous, and the highway too busy, but the subdivision is my last choice. The condos here are exact copies of one another, in a dark, muted gray, mimicking the landscape in never-ending reflections. I feel trapped in an Escher drawing. Howdy casts wary glances to either side, and his bright blanket reflects loudly off the shiny windows.
Hoofbeats echo, and the air is still. Perhaps the apocalypse has come, I think, and we are the only survivors. Perhaps in this neighborhood everyone works third shift, and they’re asleep. Maybe they are watching behind drawn curtains, suspecting the worst of a stranger. Maybe they are simply out hunting.
The roar of an SUV grows, and I press my left leg to Howdy, asking him to hug the curb. He balks at the sidewalk—he’s heard rumors sidewalks swallow horses whole. Boy, does he feel sheepish when the concrete holds his weight! I forgive him this misconception—my horse has never seen a sidewalk before.
Apparently, the people in the SUV have never seen a horse before. A rainbow of cheap knits stretched tightly over plentiful flesh pours out. Auntie wears spectacles and a haircut like a medieval warrior. Her sister curls her lip to show yellowed teeth, and I am reminded of a fighting dog. The daughter, a pear-shaped twenty-something, has hair the color of cotton candy. They stand like a disapproving wall of fat, staring.
Howdy doesn’t even flick an ear toward our audience, but I glare plainly, and I hope, with as much disgust on my face as they are showing on theirs. My horse leaves the sidewalk and steps strongly back onto asphalt, striding for home. The echo of his steps helps me recognize how quickly I can leave humanity behind, and we boldly turn ninety degrees and lope off through a backyard. I hear faintly a boy’s voice: “There’s a horse in the middle of the street!”
Ah, but we wouldn’t be in the middle of the street if you hadn’t paved it all. We wouldn’t be in the middle of the street if modern neon warriors weren’t zealously guarding their private properties, allowing deer to cross borders but no one else. We wouldn’t be in the middle of the street if your parents weren’t so enthusiastically proliferating, little boy, because then there would be some wild land yet remaining for us to ride.

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