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

the kitchen, the light is dusty on the pitcher of sweet tea. Mother pulled out the tea bags, wrung them, left them beside the pitcher on the counter. Red Rose bags browning there and drying out. All at once I bust them up with my lavender hands, crumble them onto my bare feet and the floor, I sprinkle tea crumbs on my head, tea leaves that grow the rose kangaroo, the tiny blue elephant—they can grow a tiny me too, tiny and pretty and simple and loved forever, a greenblue Frankie, wondrously small, a tiny hard figurine. No, still too large. I want to be the farthest bird, drawn there, barely a tick of pencil before the evening sun.

IN A JAR, DROWSY HEADS OF BLUE IRIS, but not on a summer porch. On the linoleum square pattern of my bathroom floor, blue iris against red in awful amounts. I woke to bathwater running. I tried to move.

“Easy,” said Clarissa. “I think you hit your head on the tub. We’ll get you to the doctor, but let’s clean you up.”

My inner acres of muscles hummed hot and cold. My palm to belly, I felt the cool tight drum, still cramping mildly. My mouth filmy, I coughed. The blood on the floor was thick and black. She unbuttoned my dress and unsleeved each heavy doll arm.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I need to get you up and in the tub.” She propped me and heaved gently, I winced.

“My god,” I said. “Clarissa.”

“It’s okay.” She cried with no sound. She peeled off my soaked underwear, eased me down in the water with my bra on, then unhooked it. I looked like someone maimed. She soaked a rag in the bathwater, brought it soothing to my neck, my back. I shut my eyes.

She said, “I was bringing irises for Mave, I saw your truck.”

Their terrible bright heads there in the jar on the floor. I was still bleeding. She washed my breasts and my face.

“It’s okay,” she said. Then: “You know, the painting prints Tess gives me never show women as they are.” She shook her head slightly. “Naked women in baths who are never hairy. Ever notice that? Like pearls. They should paint us how we are.” Hair around my nipples, down my belly to my matted nest obscured by red bathwater. I sobbed, dry and hard. “It’s okay,” she kept saying, stains down her white blouse.

“I didn’t know I wanted a baby,” I said, “but I did want it. I wanted her, but she didn’t know.”

“She knew.”

“I’m cold.”

Clarissa worked the rag from water to skin but soon the water was not water, so she pulled the plug and stood me up, wrapped me in old towels, the few left in the closet, my groin and thighs a low- frequency throb. She said she’d lay some garbage bags and blankets on the car seat and come right back, we’d go to the hospital.

I stood in the tub and watched the irises. I knew the baby would have been a girl on a bike finding her way, knowing me, understanding me, and studying the heavy heads of two irises, like two blue planets—one of blue glacial ice, one of blue flame, the hottest part—she would have known both the blue planets in me. My shut mouth. My cold blue lips pressed together. She would have explained me to myself. She would have had an ease in the world.

“She’s gone,” I said to Clarissa coming back with an old robe and a blanket from somewhere. “I’m cold, Clarissa.” She wrapped me up. The water finished draining and left viscous ribbons around my feet, like paint.

“I HAVE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS,” Mave said.

I drove.

“Where’d that gun come from?” asked Nan. “Were you going to shoot me?”

“You always infringe,” Mave said to me. “Lord over.”

“Were we going to rob a place?” Nan studied the mirror, eye encircled in yellow. Some fierce dark still along her left eyebrow.

“Perforation,” said Mave. “A little breathing help.”

Nan knew what the gun was for, she was only trying to lighten the mood. I steadied on the road and watched the lines, a Jeep bumper, the blank median. I disregarded what state we were in, I pushed it from my mind, all sense of location and compass.

“It was only for protection,” I said, “but Mave’s bad news with a gun. One time she shot my cousin Belinda’s dog in a fight with a groundhog. Took aim at the groundhog after it had already run off—it was a good hundred feet away from Brownie.”

“That was a twelve gauge,” Mave said. “Buckshot radiates out. It’s like shrapnel. This was my Browning, very precise. And expensive.”

“One time she made me turn my pet wild bird loose. I’d found it hit by a car, she deemed it rehabilitated, and a hawk got it. She shot the hawk. Thought I’d feel better.”

“You did feel better.”

“Once she shot a skunk under my house and the smell soaked into everything, all the rooms and curtains, all my clothes, in my hair. You could smell it on my skin. She made me bathe in tomato juice.”

“God, you hold a grudge. I apologized for that.”

“You never apologized for anything.”

“It was rabid. That skunk.” Mave watched the world zoom by. I wanted her to face me.

“You never apologized. You gave me prints of paintings torn from Ruth’s books. For the skunk, you gave me a Klimt—Judith holding the head of Holofernes after she’d decapitated him. She wore that glamorous gold dog collar.”

Mave didn’t face me. No reply.

“Those gold moons on her unfastened coat. She had one boob sticking out.”

She sucked extra air, talked at her window. “Judith’s look is incredible. It’s his best painting.”

“Why couldn’t you just talk to me?” I said.

Nothing. Nothing when there’s something to really say. There can be acres of bitterness and sadness in one person, words lost to briers and quicksand. The truth is, Ruth, I knew she had saved me. She was my savior,