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

the ever-present damp of this climate I had never not known. I could hear the seepage in the ditch. In the opposite direction lay Rex and Miranda’s, where spring water cooled those milkhouse stones, always the wetness, like a blacker color to things. No fade-out whitewash, no sun bleach. Even then I thought about how the desert must be bright and blackless and clear.

A mile and a half down the road, about a hundred yards off, sat the Ellafritz house, and Stew’s lay beyond. Under the front porch light were two of the adopted Ellafritz girls, one standing and one sitting in a kitchen chair. The seated one lazily noted me with her gaze but said nothing. They were no more than fifteen but had a baby each, and some flesh spilling over their jean-cutoff waists, stretching their floral tank tops. They were doing each other’s makeup on the porch, taking turns, it seemed, in the chair. I watched from the road as one worked on the other, cigarette dangling off her lip, and I wanted a smoke. The seated one’s eyes closed and her lids went sheen with violet. A coffee can of soot for mascara, applied by Q-tip. I got close enough to climb their six steps, though they pretended I wasn’t there. An infant cried in the house but “Just a little longer” said the standing girl, her movements deft. She needed to get the coral perfect along the high ridge of cheekbone, brushing the cake of it in the compact and slanting the upward application, until her breasts hurt enough, like homing devices, longing for the tiny wailing mouth and squinted face. She went inside, leaving the other on the chair to light up.

Belinda had told me the girls nursed each other’s sometimes. Neither of the girls was pretty. They weren’t going anywhere tonight; they looked unshowered. Grandeur only from the neck up. We were both in our own skulls, the girl and I, but she turned and looked me up and down. I felt she could see my belly hard. She could see the child starting there now, just a hive of cells. She picked up a shard of mirror, tilted up her chin.

“What do you think?” she said. The foundation was caked on, but her lined eyes and her lashes sooted with homemade mascara did jump out.

“Looks pretty,” I said.

The other returned with an infant at her breast. She started in with lip liner with her free hand.

I walked on, and the way their screen door sounded behind me, as one of them went inside, invoked my mother through the long hallway of time, the way she had stood on the porch once. She’d boiled water for ear corn and, afterward, walked outside to throw the silk-littered water off the side of the porch and not in the sink, and stood listening to the supper-hour night. I remembered her looking kind in that moment, though she was not kind, an image in the porch light to wake in the mind of her daughter years later. And now this one inside me would recall me in some way. I put my hand on my middle, over the eyelet, over the pair of eyes forming in the dark.

By the time I got to Stew’s, the dusk-to-dawn on the shed was the only light. The house was dark, Clay and Danny and Billy were gone, Jennie likely asleep. I saw the beautiful red truck, the prize, its tire booted. Whenever Stew would speak, the words were like sparse growing things. Once, when buffing the rust from my pickup in his body shop, he’d simply said, “Come,” showing me the work he’d almost finished, kneeling to study the fender as I studied his temple and ear.

I walked up to the truck in my white dress and put my open hand to the driver-side window. I waited for him to sit up full of horse taste, my palm like a light. I drew closer and tented my eyes to look in the window and saw the cab was empty.

I WALKED THE NEXT HALF MILE TO MY HOUSE. I Still kept a few changes of clothes in the closet. I changed into a blue blouse I’d once loved and jeans and hung up the belted eyelet dress. Outside Mave’s, I saw the basketball long left in the peony bushes beside the house, lead-like. I wiped off the grime of old leaves, shot it toward the hoop Mave had put up for me on a two-by-eight. Air ball. Only the hoop was left, the net had disintegrated. I took a few more shots with the dead ball and, with each, I felt the darts in the sides of the blouse restrict, then I let the ball roll on.

“Hey, come in here,” Mave called out the window. “I’ve got the bog people on.” She wore bathrobe and boots, gray hair frizzed. “The ancient Danes.”

I refused a beer but sat with her in the PBS glow.

“I wore this blue blouse one time,” I said, “and Clay said I looked nice. Then I hid it in my house and didn’t want to ever wear it again.”

“Then why are you wearing it again?”

“I don’t know.”

On screen, the bog bodies of Denmark writhed without moving. A man from the fourth century BC looked like he’d simply gone to sleep except he’d taken an ax down the nose bone, bludgeoned was the word used, probably a human sacrifice thrown to the bog, which sucked the body down and sealed out all the air so centuries later he’d come up looking made of bronze. As if out the throughside of the LaFaber foundry. He still had lips, the voiceover said, and kidneys and spleen, his hair.

“There must be something else out there,” I said.

“Other than the old sacrifice?”

“Other than this.”

“Thinking in broad strokes, you have it pretty good. You have not been bludgeoned to death.” Mave held out her hand to chop, demonstrated the blow to