Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

glommed with old TVs and encyclopedias and potato skins growing hair. Debris born from porch light, as though uttered by it.

Her mind itched, she would’ve said if I had asked. Drink is a good scratch. This was one of her bad days.

I propped her up in the patio chair. I had not come for her as much as for myself. I got a Pilsner from her fridge and split it into two pint jars. She situated thickly into the chair and took a sip to ease herself from hangover, and she smelled my uncertainty, ripe as her odor.

“What’s Miranda think?” she asked, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, which I suppose we always were—a dense forest of it. Mave had called me on the phone because she hadn’t been able to get up off the floor, her body able as ever, breath strong at that time, legs all muscle, but mentally immovable from her pool of large unwashed shirt. Healthy as a horse, she’d say if I asked, but as she raised the Ball jar to her lips I saw that she’d scraped her knuckles somehow.

“Why does it matter what Miranda thinks?” I said. “What do you think?”

Mave rubbed her dirty shirt and sweater against her tired breasts not strapped down by their compression bra. She surveyed the moods available and settled on the one in which she knew Aunt Miranda would have been the better mother to me after their sister, my mother Margot, had died. So: the deflection. Go ask Miranda.

The porch light stretched far enough to show where a clan of crocus had unsutured the ground. Near that, a tight peony bud shivered at the ghost of a bird. I looked over toward my empty house in which I’d lived my entire life, first with my parents, then as an orphan, with Mave as my guardian but we stayed in our separate houses, which everyone found strange. My window lights ever within sight through our break in the barbed wire and the wild rose. I could smell the grass trying to remember itself in thaw, the blades stretching toward the notion of summer. About a mile out on the ridge, the lights of the bronze plant glowed a dome over the town. I wanted Mave to sleep then wake up. Only once had I found her with a handgun nearby, her Browning pistol. Only once had I raised my head terrified that she’d used it.

I scanned the porch—an old butter churn, the three TVs with burned-out picture tubes, the potato peelings in a Shop ’n Save produce box. A gun could disappear in so much junk. “Miranda says I’ll think myself into the grave. And she says I’m thirty-five with no kids, I’m a part-time janitor, and the State Road has benefits.”

“The State does have benefits.”

What Miranda said was that if I didn’t marry Clay Good I’d end up like Mave. When I was a child, what Miranda said was, “My sister is very bright, but can’t you see that it has done her in?” Miranda’s eyes teary, her housedress neat and trim, and her mantle as wife and mother of four bowing her back but also relieving her of any doubt, of any discernible restlessness.

“And she thinks his gospel band sounds professional,” I said. “The Good News Boys, like a cassette tape.”

“Christ.” Mave laughed. I felt some danger pass. We sat for a while, setting our pint jars on top of the never-used electric butter churn missing a part, then I rinsed them in the kitchen and filled them with water and she drank hers. The doubt, the restlessness, was all she and I knew. Moths flitted to the light without hazard. I stepped down off the porch to snap off two purple crocuses for her and put them in my jar on the churn.

I had peered out through the kitchen curtains in Clay’s mother’s house, eyes peeled for the sarvisberry, but there was only bud-green, mostly brown and black, and Clay saying that’s where his mother Lottie’s trailer would go. He’d stood a few feet away from me, a head taller than I, smelling of blacktop and work gloves. His gaze gentle. In the corner of the kitchen sat his guitar case with a sticker on it that said I Am the First and the Last with the name of the Baptist youth camp underneath. His hound Ellis slept beside it. Clay’s band had a song about The Great I Am, the First and the Last. Alpha and Omega. I wondered what lay between the First and Last, in the middle, and how cramped was the bookended space, or how vast? Lottie’s trailer would go right there and block my mind’s route to the woods.

“You think I should marry him?” I asked Mave.

“Who am I to say?” She squared her shoulders. “You even want a kid?”

I didn’t answer. Lottie’s curtains were muslin, homemade. They muffled things. A child was a muffled idea to me then, with no real legs or arms or fever.

“Inconsequential is what I think,” Mave said. “You should write your book.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“A book about what?”

She never said. She mused, flicked through her file-cabinet mind and internal shelving where miniature versions of all your books sat, passages flagged and memorized, and where her memories of you stayed sealed. Her thoughts telescoped. My mind shrank from hers sometimes, and sometimes kept pace. I told her Lottie would move into a trailer he would put in back, by the woods.

“But it’s her house. She’s lived there a century.”

“I know.” I lit a cigarette and offered, but she said no. “Since when?”

“Since I got the patch.” She slipped off one natty sweater sleeve and showed me the flesh-colored bandage on her upper arm. “It makes me dream in blue. I’m just doing it for Miranda. They said I’m overdue for everything, the tit microwave, the butt scope, some pelvic spelunking. I said I’d check my schedule.” She rubbed below her breasts where the