Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

She looked in the mirror when she was done. She was sweating from the cold. She could see her ribs just a little. She’d first seen them a few days ago, and it was so strange each time. She’d felt overweight for so long – she’d been told she wasn’t, of course, but telling never helped, not when you didn’t feel it, not when you didn’t see the evidence with your own eyes. And now a miracle was here – skin stretched over bone. She’d been dieting for months, the only exception being her birthday. But the ribs were still there.

She’d forgotten her clean clothes. Shit. She peeked out into the hallway and, seeing a clear coast but for their stupid cat Toby, ran across to her bedroom and locked the door again. She dried her mouse-brown hair and wondered how it might look if she dyed it sometime. She thought about the new vet’s hair colour – a kind of dark chestnut, maybe, almost black. Or something different, she didn’t know. She worried she might look weird. As if she didn’t already.

As she pulled her clothes on, she thought about the snake she’d seen earlier.

She thought about the noise of the cars throughout the day. The wheels, turning and turning against the soil.

She sat down at her computer – an old and slow device, even by the outmoded standards of her family – and played a game for a while. She tried to settle herself.

In the game her character fell in love. She’d made all the correct choices, following a guide on another website. It was her tenth time playing it. Peter said he’d played it, once at least. But Peter mostly watched recordings of games, he didn’t actually buy them or play them himself. So did a lot of people. Rebecca hadn’t seen her friend for months, now, not face to face. If they’d ever even earned that term, if he and the others had ever even cared about her. She didn’t know.

You didn’t have to be yourself. You didn’t have to hold close all the things you had suffered and still suffered, all the things you had done to others and that were still done to you. You could just pretend or forget. You could think however you wanted to; they were just thoughts, weren’t they, and what were thoughts but made up? What was consciousness but a form of fiction? You could make your life a life of stories. This was her mother’s gift to her.

Her life as it was now, in these games without people, in messages without faces – Rebecca lost her head in machines. She lost her body in thoughts.

She’d felt overweight for so long. Like there was too much of her. Others had said so. She’d asked Peter what he thought, once, trying to seek another opinion, some kind of escape. He’d just looked embarrassed. He’d just said he didn’t know.

There was a knock on the door. It was time for dinner.

The hall was empty again, but for the white ball of cat, licking the fluff off its own belly. Rebecca walked towards the lounge, and the cat leapt round and ran away down the hall. She pushed the door open.

They ate venison steak for dinner, blood practically seeping from the barely cooked cuts. Her father liked to claim he was a vegetarian, sometimes; he said it to strangers, he told it to friends, then ate meat all the same. He thought it was funny, this secret violence, though the joke was never clear to her.

She didn’t eat much of anything.

Her father wiped bloody gravy from his moustache with a flick of his tongue. Half-forgotten greens lay steaming to the side. They watched the news in silence but for the scrapes of knives against plates. A politician was being interviewed.

‘Should this just be a case of “put up, shut up”?’

‘Well, first of all, I’d say it’s rather oxymoronic, even dangerous to throw around phrases like “put up, shut up” when we’re talking about the expression of democratic values – the casting of a vote doesn’t have to mean the end of a debate. Laws change, governments lie, and sometimes people don’t know what they want, or worse – groups pervert our institutions to oppress others for their own gain. The history of democracy is littered with tyrants and demagogues who gained power through perfectly legitimate means, and we shouldn’t forget this—’

Her father abruptly changed the channel. He always did it without asking, even when her mother had still lived here.

This flu was something else. She was still sweating from the shower. The meat hadn’t helped.

She tried to forget about it, sipping her water.

On the TV screen, a man in a black suit sat across a table from a dishevelled wreck of a human being. The room was dark. It looked like a detective drama, but it wasn’t, not really. Something was off.

‘I need to get home.’

Rebecca watched as the man in the black suit just stared at his captive.

‘Is this going to take very long?’

The man in the black suit took out a cigarette packet and placed it on the table, quite deliberately. ‘Can I smoke? Do you smoke?’

The prisoner nodded. The man removed a cigarette, lit it, and took a puff.

‘Why am I here?’

‘Why don’t you tell me about your day?’

‘No.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I want to know why I’m here.’

The man stared at him. ‘You play chess?’ He tapped his cigarette in the tray.

‘No. Once or twice. You?’

‘No.’

They sat in silence for a few moments.

‘Why do you want to get home so badly?’ the man asked.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

Rebecca felt light-headed again, so she finished her drink. She touched her forehead. It felt cold, clammy, somehow.

There was meowing from the hall.

‘Did you feed him?’

Her father nodded, not taking his eyes off the screen. He hadn’t spoken to her all day, but for pleasantries and grunts.

The cat began to move towards their dirty plates. He tried to be coy and stealthy and above it