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

skeletons were discovered in a septic tank outside the city. Near a Catholic home for girls. I quit reading and took up the notepad with the big red six on it, the Bic pen.

“Work on your book,” Mave said.

“Yeah.”

“Eat something.”

“Not hungry.”

“You cannot write of hunger unless you are hungry.”

“I think I should call Clay.”

“And say what?”

“That Ellis is with me.”

“You can take dictation for the book if you like, you can quote me. This codeine should kick in soon, and I’m liable to speak French. Should be profound.”

“Are you feeling pain?”

“I feel like a tiny man stole into my body through my butthole and is sucking away my air and he’s taken an electric sander to my left lung. Also—if you’d like an inventory of the details—I’m in a shitbox motel with you and Gypsy Moth making our way at crawling speed to a desert I may never see. I have only one more of these portable tanks. And you forgot to say no mayo on my club.” Her arms spread out like Jesus. “I’m fine. Write something from your dream head.”

“It’s empty. Sorry about the mayo.”

“Then use something else.”

“I’ve got nothing, Mave.”

“Then make it up whole cloth. Shit, you know you don’t know what to say until you start. Use the goddamn brain I helped shape.”

“Helped warp,” I said. I held the notepad. “I’ll just call Clarissa again.”

“Write about the day. Write down her pathetic but sincere offering of Twizzlers.”

“I don’t have time.”

“I’m the one with no time.” Voice sharp. “You’re lousy with time, you’re rolling in it, you’re like Ellis in carnage. You have the stench of time scumming up your fur.”

I almost mentioned the gun but didn’t. I rubbed my dirty arms. The Army jacket lay heaped like old skin. Nan sang in the shower.

“YOU OKAY?” Clarissa asked over a fuzzy connection. “Where are you?”

The payphone in the lobby was within earshot of the clerk, who feigned busyness.

“Has Clay called?” I asked.

“Twice. What do you want me to say when he does?”

“What did you say?”

“That I don’t know where you are.”

“Miranda?”

“I told her Mave’s with you, that she had an appointment.”

“What about Dillon?”

“Dillon wouldn’t call me, Frankie.”

I felt quiet and thick. I felt him all at once, unbidden—he was dark and young and compact, his limbs were my limbs, he tied things in my long draping hair and I left them there for days, didn’t comb out the knots. I heard Tess in the background.

“Tess says to get her a turquoise ring.” More muffled talk. “And to live it up, you owe it to Mave.” Clarissa laughed. “Frankie? You there?”

“This is stupid. I don’t know that she’ll even make it.” In my throat, the admission gathered itself and lodged. “I know she won’t.” A petty cry, too, for Mave’s thin suicidal breaths and for everything else buzzing—for Nan’s body unto his mouth in their home I’d never seen, and Nan’s pathetic but genuine clamber for some kind of life, and Clay’s kind hands handling me and that time he said he hoped it would be a girl that looked like me.

“She’ll make it as far as she needs to. Listen, just sleep awhile—have you stopped for the night? Just sleep.”

BACK IN THE ROOM, I found Nan’s dirty doodles on the notepad, vulvas in lip liner. I lifted the top page and underneath, on the next sheet, a sketch of a woman with arms reaching out, a feathery movement, her hair in mid-swing. Sketched fast but with skill. It looked familiar; it reminded me of something Clarissa might draw. Nan’s disastrous hair was flattened wet and harmless, and she donned the striped blue and pink dress, the price tag hanging off it. She held the newspaper, irked, pacing the wall by the heater not on, back and forth, antsy, under the paintings of palm trees and ocean and conch shells. Any calm Clarissa had willed into me dissipated to restlessness. Mave lay horizontal and quiet, holding a pillow over her eyes.

Nan started chattering about the horrible headline story I’d already had my fill of, how the tiny skeletons had been there for years, how the nuns probably made the teenage girls get rid of their babies, they’re like that, nuns. Maybe the girls hadn’t even known what happened to their newborns—whoosh, taken away—and they probably didn’t get drugs for the birth even, nuns don’t give drugs to wayward girls.

“Cool it, Nan,” I said. “Mave’s trying to sleep.” I found my toiletry Ziploc. I wanted a shower, but she kept on.

“I will not cool it, I know what I’m talking about. I know some things you don’t, despite what you and Crazy think about me being second-rate.” Young face going stricken and a body in a dress I’d bought her.

“I’m showering, Nan. Watch TV or something.”

“I heard your husband’s band play once,” she said.

I dodged it, knowing my nerves were frayed. “I’m going to shower, just cool it.”

She blocked the bathroom door, agitated and fretful. “Look at me. I said I heard Clay’s band, they were pretty good. He looked pretty good to me. I’d sleep with him. You wouldn’t care, would you? If I fucked him?”

The slap was hard and loud. Her head swiveled back to the right. Stayed there. Mave creaked the bed. Nan slowly raised her face, her eyes welling up.

“Finally got that out of your system,” she said.

All heat in my face, I needed air. “Nan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Yes, you did. You expect the same thing from me as everybody else. You think the same as everybody, that there’s nothing to me. But I told you, I want more.”

My hand was hot, her left cheek red in the bad light. Her eyes darted to Mave, who I knew was watching.

Nan said, “Dillon found me when I was selling these dumb leather bracelets at a road stand in Georgia. I embossed them and painted them, they were pretty and worthless. You know how intense he is, those eyes that