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

see everything and make you feel like you’ve got layers, and his silence that seems shy and sweet at first. He’s a slow smolder, but I knew early on he was dangerous and he’d trap me. He got me pregnant, but I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be bound.” Nan in the new striped dress on a truth-telling streak. “Ask me how many I threw away.”

“How many what?” I said.

“Ask me how many babies.”

“How many?”

“Three. His was the third.” She smoothed her dress with the Tennessean rolled up. “I’m not proud of it, but I thought I could be an artist or something. More than a body for men and babies. They didn’t give me enough drugs for that last one. And the nuns and priests protested outside the clinic. They had all these blown-up pictures of unborn alien babies. They said horrible things about me, but they didn’t know me.”

I felt my jealous coil heat for a moment, my throat constrict at the mention of a child by Dillon and the choice to throw away a thing I could not stop from slipping through my fingers. Mave stayed quiet.

Nan said, “I was in bed for a few days after that one, told Dillon it was flu, but, when I could, when he left for a half-day flight spraying for moth, I got some paint and I found their church and I painted huge cocks on the walls. A bunch of beautiful colors.”

Mave started laughing softly, and Nan smiled at her own transgression.

I said to her, “I lost one once. Last spring.”

She didn’t say anything, but nodded. Dead babies hung in the nicotine air, and she moved away from the bathroom door, all renegade and sore, slapped. So beautiful in her wild look. She said, “I should have kept going, painting all the walls everywhere, really painting. But how? I ended up bound to Dillon in the end, baby or no baby.”

I felt the Ziploc still in my left hand. “I’m sorry I hit you,” I said.

“It’s all right.” She bit her lip.

“No, it’s not. I’m sorry.” I entered the bathroom and shut myself in softly and got the shower as hot as I could upon my back, my closed eyes, my neck, my belly.

I LAY BESIDE MAVE, NAN IN HER OWN DOUBLE.

“I have to say, I miss the hibiscus,” Mave said. “The flora of the homeland.”

“There are hibiscus here,” I said. “We’re only a few hundred miles from home.”

“I miss the walnut trees.”

“We’re in the same temperate zone.”

“I miss the sphagnum moss. That we’ve surely left behind. We’ve left the swamp farts. All the putrid skunk cabbage pussing out marsh milk.”

“Okay, yes. We’re out of the swamp.”

“But the changes are imperceptible. I want it to look different, Frankie. Blasted, like another planet.”

“Should have gone to Miami then,” said Nan. “Told you. Climb a fucking palm tree.”

Mave laughed and so did Nan. I twisted loose my thick rope of wet hair and strung it out on the pillow above my head. I laughed and it felt good to laugh after tonight’s heat, after telling our horrible truths. Mave said we’ll swing by the bus station and send Little Gypsy packing, we’ll drug you, she said, and you’ll wake up in your sunny Florida. Nan kept laughing, loose and easy, lightened. I breathed in the tar, stretched up my arms, hands meeting in the woods of my wet hair. You know—I could almost see us young and unfettered and untrapped and full of promise. I could glimpse a shape under the baby blanket wadded in a wagon. Pulling the Radio Flyer behind my girl self, and there was that shape of a thing I could almost see, something almost born, before cousin Belinda got in, whining for her turn to ride. It was a body haulable, transportable. And small.

I’M UP AT THREE A.M. WRITING YOU.

One time Mave said, “The spring snow is so marvelous. My mind is white and bald as that. Or maybe it’s white as garden lime and burnt.” She stood in her filthy bathrobe facing the window as I scrubbed her floor, though she hadn’t asked me to. I cleaned the grime to reveal tongue fitted to groove. I used a Brillo pad and cleaned a square of floor to blondness. And what was my mind like?

In the spring of our first year married, Clay’s band got invited to play the Good Friday fish fry under the pavilion at Snyder’s Crossing. I could easily conjure the smell of trout and crappie and catfish in tinfoil and the cheap punch in Styrofoam cups, the crackle of the tinny amp and Clay’s new song. He said he would need to hold extra practices in the house. We sat at supper, the two of us, with asparagus I’d cut from Lottie’s overgrown bed and lamb from Rex.

“You’ll come out and hear us,” he said in a vague tone somewhere between question and statement.

“At the Crossing?” I speared asparagus at the tough stalk and bit. I hadn’t been to the church in almost two decades, even to see the bathroom that Belinda’s contractor husband—her second one—had installed. I said, “Last time I was there, the outhouse still stood, with that prim lattice around it, like something of another century.” He turned his face toward the dark rectangle of screen door and the spring night beyond it. “Clay, I get to hear you every practice. Private concert.”

“I don’t ask for anything much,” he said, and the supper glow—plate, milk, tender meat, the things that compose the comfort of supper that man and wife share routinely—warmed his oval face that turned now from the door to me. His ease so evident whenever we courted normal routine. “The other wives come out to hear us.”

“I’m not the other wives.”

“Frankie.”

“Clay.”

He lost his ease in a soft snort. As offering, I said I’d prepare snacks for practices.

He said, “And I need you to tend to Mom,” salvaging at