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

her face in slow motion. “You’re not big- league in the tragedy department.”

The voice said archaeologists could test the hair and know what he’d eaten, could study his stomach and tell us his last meal. Both skull and brain were intact. The peat moss, the cool bog acid, like vinegar, dissolved most of the bones but not the skin.

“You’re shitting me,” Mave said to the TV. “Skin pickled like eggs.”

I said, “Every day Clay hands me his lunchbox to wash and a thermos with coffee stains. My breathing is erratic. I feel the air sealing off.”

“How’s Lottie?”

“The same.”

“Maybe you’re lucky with no air. Your hair will be preserved just the way you fix it.”

“Bury me in this blouse after you bludgeon me.”

“But once the body hits the air—look at that shit. They brought him up into the Denmark air and the change was violent and fast, he oxidized. They had to get him into that capsule before he dissolved like salt.”

In my head, Clay turned to me his boyish face the color of an antacid tablet, of cat tongues, and said, when he entered the kitchen, You look nice. The blouse cool on both arms, against all my skin except where the bra was.

“Maybe what you need is to oxidize,” she said.

They went on with Grauballe Man and Elling Woman of the Iron Age, then the Bronze Age Cashel Man of the Irish peat bogs, the oldest fleshed body crouching in the peat longer than anyone.

“I bet we have our own around here,” Mave said, “pickled in the Caudell bog. We should start foraging for them in the skunk cabbage.”

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

She looked at me. Didn’t say anything with her mouth, only her eyes. She looked back at the TV.

I didn’t picture myself bludgeoned. I pictured my black hair growing long and wrapping around me like a coat so all you could see was my head, my face, but the rest was shrouded and cut off, my limbs tangled. With my arms restrained, I wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone.

THE PAPERY MOTEL BED SHEETS CRUSHED UP TO MY CHIN, I lay imagining the aerial view of the New Mexico desert, radioactive and bombed out, the mesas blue at sunrise, haggard white by noon. The New Agers would have their open-air market, trading in spiritual goods—come get your new life in the wide rocky spaces, get a Navajo turquoise ring for twenty bucks, and I’d get one for Clarissa’s Tess. Get a buffalo scrotum purse for twenty-five. A purer soul for thirty. But, aside from the racket, there would be the true wilderness of conversion. Be changed, it says. It says: I will not restore you to the same. It says: There is no tourist trinket for what I will do, for what it means to become nothing. I thought of that, Ruth; I thought of the relief.

I turned to see the vague outline of Nan lying on her stomach, ear down on her pillow, face toward the pastel palm trees on the wall, arms wide out in free fall like a child’s. The hair, tamed wet last night, had sprung back into its wild nest. Ellis had chosen her in the night, a pile tucked to her side. The thick drapes kept me in question about the time, but their rim of bright sun said we were up late.

Mave was gone.

I sat up and checked under the mattress for the keys. Still there. I went to the drapes to check the car anyway, looked for a popped trunk, but it was shut. At the foot of the bed, Mave’s suitcase. My gym shorts and tank top clung. I’d let in enough light through the window to wake Nan, who groaned and shoved the mound of dog.

Out the window, I watched Mave exit the lobby door with two cups. She wore her favorite red flannel shirt. She managed the oxygen in her armpit, like a rolled Tennessean.

“Am I in Florida yet?” asked Nan, mooning from a spillover of the night’s goodwill.

Mave crossed the lot to our room, her stiff walk, her unshielded squinting eyes. She saw me spying so I opened the door.

“Could have left a note,” I said. Daylight pounded in.

“It’s Sunday. Had to make the call early to catch Miranda.” She gave me a coffee.

“Where’s mine?” said Nan, sitting up in her silky and pink, strap off the shoulder. The dejected Ellis snuffled for an ear scratch.

“You called Miranda?” I said. The coffee tasted day-old, I gave it to Nan. “What did you tell her?”

“I caught her before church, but she’d already been out to the primrose.”

“What did you say to her?” I felt the headache all at once, long after it had settled. Like somebody throwing elbows in my mind.

Mave sipped, winced. “The primrose, I mean, imagine. Little gaudy things. Some people pry the day open, that’s Miranda. But with a fingernail file, not a crowbar. Hers is a gentle force, prying with equal measure at all edges, and then she eases the lid off.”

“Enough circumlocution,” I said.

“Hey, watch the language for Gypsy—keep the syllables down.”

“Fuck off,” said Nan. She rolled out of bed languidly and slipped into the bathroom.

Mave’s face softened and suspended itself elsewhere, and my eyes absorbed the encroaching ache in my head. I breathed in the last of the tar and nicotine from the linens, the walls, the carpets. I asked her if she’d taken her pills. I asked about the primrose.

“Her women’s group will pray for me in Sunday school as they always do,” Mave said, “as they have since the beginning of time for the cancer people and the lost. They lower their lashes and picture us like shelter puppies in a pen, in amongst our turds.”

Nan flushed and emerged and brushed her teeth on one stork leg flipping through the motel welcome book, deliberate to be part of the conversation.

“It’s okay,” Mave said. “Miranda goes out to the primrose already dressed for Sunday, salting the slugs, taking a