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

once around a body, but it was big enough for his small self. He dried his face, his eyes, his neck. His two friends remained tentative. He was different now.

The mother grabbed him in a quick hug that broke the spell, and he squirmed to get out of it. He broke free, flung the towel around his back and held the corners under his chin, took off running, the towel his Superman cape, and the other two followed, running, since he was again the boy they knew, and no one scolded. The kids on the bar hopped down and gave chase, the singing pronged out, the tall man still in the pool upraised his arms in a formal benediction while the soul saved and sanctified took the corner and kept flying, toward us, cracking up. The girl in the bunch waved at us as they raced by and then turned to head back to the congregation now talking and visiting. Someone brought towels to the preacher rising from the pool. I watched his large hands take a towel, shake another hand, rub his own head of close-cropped black hair, reach into his pocket to pull out something he’d forgotten to remove, now wet through, and he laughed.

We stayed quiet, we three fugitives. The pool water tremored. Mave soon flipped through the atlas to find our coordinates in the city, suggested a direction, and I started the car.

“I loved that,” said Nan softly.

Mave said we’d see signs for 40 West once we crossed the Cumberland River. I just drove. My arms felt wobbly, as if energy had surged through them and then nothing.

“I loved it,” Nan said again.

I kept picturing the gentle touch, man’s hand on boy’s slim back, his barely back, just a slip of person. I watched Mave’s hands acutely, bitten nails and bony fingers, watched her trace the turnoffs on the page over the tiny string of blue that meant river. How rarely we touched, she and I.

“Take Jefferson,” Mave said quietly. None of us wanted to speak loudly or stir the air very much. Mave said then, “Give him a page in your book, that kid. Give him a whole chapter.” She watched the storefronts pass, the signs and awnings. “Write a chapter on a boy dunked in a hotel pool and wrapped in skinny towels.”

“You don’t believe in the Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” I said.

“I believe in that boy’s cape.”

“I don’t know,” said Nan, “I just loved it. I’d like to paint a boy getting baptized then flying.”

The traffic had picked up. I swelled with a sense of things blurring by too fast out the windows. I switched the blinker on, but I wanted stillness somehow. Maybe it was the boy running and the look of Mave watching. I wanted to freeze it. Indeed, paint it. I wanted more time. I thought about her earlier farewell call to Miranda, and I thought about the gun, and I wanted Mave to live. Maybe she would live. I turned us onto a bridge and the sign for 40 instructed me into the right lane. There was a shoulder, narrow but big enough for the car, I put the hazards on and pulled off.

“What’s wrong?” asked Nan.

“Not here,” said Mave, “next turn.”

I still saw the tremor in the pool. My arms were weak. I gripped the steering wheel then popped the trunk and got out. I shoved aside the suitcases, lifted the thick carpet cover, and unwedged the Browning pistol. Mave opened her door, but not in time. I threw the gun overhand into the river below. Tiny splash. I got back in the car.

In the rearview, I saw Nan about to speak but she didn’t. Cars zipped past, honked, complained. Mave’s door was still open and I asked her to please shut it.

She put both palms on the atlas and smoothed it out and did not look at me, she set her jaw. She took a breath that was not deep, and I panicked with a second of doubt, but I summoned the magic of that kid in his cape, dripping wet. I wanted her to live, Ruth, don’t you see? We would finish this joyride then go home, get treatment, and she would live. And I believed it as I signaled and pulled us back into the flow of traffic and onto I-40.

MY COUSIN BELINDA HAD ALWAYS HAD AN INKLING. She got pinned like a bug early. A beautiful body pinned to the mat and felt up by boys at the fringe of supervision. And pinned by Miranda stooped and hopeful to have a second-self with pageant potential, not too smart, thank god, nothing of Mave’s ruinous genes. “Not the brightest,” our mothers said at the kitchen table, whether or not Belinda was within earshot holding her rouged doll by the hair. They petted Belinda’s head; my mother did so greedily, wishing me more like my cousin, softer, more in line. Miranda certainly saw me as heir to the ruin and ill-colored and strange, and then after Mother and Dad died, a feral animal raised by an unnatural drunkard. From the start, I was left to develop my mind in peace and wear boy clothes without hassle. Belinda wore everything fitted to her early-forming breasts and slim waist, a body like carved ivory.

But she had an inkling of what lay beyond the frame, like someone studying a photo’s narrative beyond its border: there is more than the posed figure, there is more than this. By rights, she felt sorry for my dearth of everything—Pity you never had boyfriends, god your chewed nails, here’s a dress I don’t wear anymore, here’s a spare husband, a baby you can hold and coo at.

When we played as small girls, she made shadow puppets of her life to come. She played house, able with a broom, played beauty shop or soap opera. I played tractor trailer and pulled my wagon. Once, as I tied a bandana around my neck