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

wafting from mouth and skin, but the black walnut meat was still the stronger, more bitter smell.

I SLEPT THERE, AT MY OWN HOUSE, ALONE. I let the muggy air and the sound of their voices sift over me. I wonder now, Ruth, what you would have made of this congregation, the things made, cooked down, bundled up. It was all uttering, wasn’t it? Uttering like prayer, a way to connect to the life inside our lives as our outer lives unfolded in ways we had not expected. Sleeping in my childhood bed, I corralled my thoughts away from memory, from Dillon, and toward the next unfoldment, what I might next say to Clay at supper—maybe a request for a new porcelain sink after all, maybe for a trip together, maybe my hand would be at rest upon his shoulder as we spoke.

I headed back to Clay and Lottie’s in the morning, almost forgetting the hambone in the pillowcase on top of the fridge. Pulling into the driveway, I saw Ellis from a ways off. He was the one for whom I intended the bone, though I knew I should make a soup with it. The hound was excited, jerky, scampering and dancing like a younger dog, not his usual languid, thick self that was supposed to draw toward me in welcome. I couldn’t tell what he was doing, circling the yew bush. He didn’t notice me and I didn’t see Lottie’s face appear at the door’s window, so I parked and switched off the ignition and sat in the cold truck cab with the goods stacked up beside me. Mini jars of bouillon, the sausage, what was left of Delores’s block of butter that I needed to get to the kitchen, the doe and fawn gourd necklace painted tenderly in the insufficient light of Clarissa’s bathroom. I pulled the pillowcase holding the plastic-bagged hambone into my lap. Nowhere to go but here, I said inside my head, to this other house and this unfolding day. My hangover was subtle, my jaw sore from something. Despite my mental gestures of the night before, I felt a stab of fierceness for myself, as if the life inside my life were a thing I might hoard. Beside the necklace sat the cotton nightgown that would fall to mid-thigh, though I would likely never wear it.

Ellis paused by the yew, stalked, prepared his haunches. I saw him dive in with an instinct prior to his domesticated days. I was out of the truck with the pillowcase in hand, and I ran sluggishly to find too late that he’d chomped a small bird from the low nest in the bush. No, I said, no, drop it—he watered his eyes at me, caught and longing, but he unclenched and let the broken thing drop.

We both looked at it. Its head nearly severed from its tiny body. It twitched and would not live. I knelt on the ground and took the dog’s brown face in my hand. I shoved him a little, his woman-eyes stupid and hurt. I felt my own stupidity or helplessness or hoarding as I postponed entering the house. He nuzzled the pillowcase, and I didn’t want to give him the hambone from Ray, but I gave it and it felt good to do so. I put my hand out and his wet nose came out of the snuffled sack of bone, the salty marrow of some other beast, and his grateful tongue hit warm and sandy on my palm. I bent into it, on my knees, in our small huddle of want and greed and harm. “Hey, Flop,” I said. “You cruel thing, come here.” Another tiny bird, bereft in the thick center of the bush, chirped open-mouthed and upward.

Ruth, I remembered, as I knelt there in the grass in front of that strange home, one of the birds, the carrion birds, a hieroglyph you’d sketched in a letter. The gray kite that scavenges. Its shrill sound the sounded-out letter attached to its drawing. The bird is its sound—the living sound that means mourning and sadness, but even so, the living sound.

MAVE SAID SHE NEEDED TO GET HORIZONTAL. She shifted in the vinyl seat, pulled her wallet from her back pocket as if it were agitating her, and held it. I’d looked in the wallet once—a photo of Miranda and my mother Margot as girls with carefully arranged hair. A pressed flower gone brown between two pieces of clear contact paper cut in a square. “All my plumbing is rusting up,” she said, hovered her hand over her chest and scanned, down and up. “Yeah, all of it.”

“You do need to lie down,” I said. It was dusk. The blue signs cropped up and brightened in the headlights. I looked for offerings of lodging with food nearby. Fast food at the next exit and a Motel 6.

“I want to know why I can’t drive my own car,” Nan said from the back.

“We’re going to take this exit,” I said.

“It’s my car. We could at least take turns.”

“We’re going to find a place to sleep.”

“Frankie,” she blared.

“Nan. Why are you bringing this up now? We said I was driving if we let you come along, and you said okay.”

“I changed my mind. This dog fucking drools.”

“Be useful, Nannette,” said Mave, “throw yourself out the window.” Voice airy and light and inwardly focused, like a voice trying to remember something.

“She doesn’t mean that,” I said. I told Nan that this was as much her car as the bag of new clothes were her clothes.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She stuck her head between our seats.

“It means Frankie drives,” said Mave, easing her posture as we got within a mile of a bed. I studied her past Nan’s head for the illness and drugs filching the light from her skin. It had been a couple of hours since she’d taken something. She was fading out. Nan jutted in further.

“Give me shotgun tomorrow, Crazy.”