Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

She went to the girls’ bathroom, passing row after row of orange lockers. She shut the door and approached the mirrors. She looked at her face, lit up by the light. There were no windows. Her face was caught in a mix of shadow and freckle. She’d put her hair up in a ponytail before she’d left. It was how she’d always worn it at school before. It was ridiculous but she wondered if things were different, a year later, if this was somehow wrong.

She played with her ponytail, trying to look right. She pulled it round so it tangled over her shoulder.

It looked like a tail. Like the twist of a snake.

She pulled the band off, letting it all hang loose. She brushed it behind her ears. She went into a stall, shut the door, and sat with her new phone in her hands. She sent messages until people could be heard in the corridor.

She opened the door and went to class.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Rebecca was early to school, in the classroom without permission.

She removed a print-out of a poem from her backpack. She took her red water bottle out and put it on the table in front of her. The whole place smelt of pencil sharpening. She had been told to make notes on this piece. They had emailed it to her. She did not know if other people would have gone through this poem already, or if she was being keen. So she read it and made her notes. They were going to do one prepared poem and one unseen piece.

No one had really remained in touch with her after she had begun home-schooling. They said they would, but they didn’t. She had a few friends on the internet that she did not really care about. The few friends she did care about fell silent after initial bursts of enthusiasm about meeting up and doing stuff together. Her father had refused to drive her into town, most times she asked.

Other people began to enter the room. A few faces she recognized, a few names. Falling out of touch with people was worse than never knowing them.

To have drifted apart was a limbo, a shadow of the thing you once had been to another, and what they had once been to you. You couldn’t sit next to a ghost.

So Rebecca ended up sitting alone in that classroom, even as dozens arrived and spread across the seats. Even as some looked at her, even as they smiled and whispered, even as the final few were forced to come close, clearly not wanting to. She sat alone, not knowing a thing but the words on the page in front of her.

They talked about the prepared poem for eight minutes. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. A piece by Robert Browning about two lovers who held each other, who wanted the moment to last forever, so the man took the other’s hair and strangled her with it.

They talked about the life of the writer. The ways it could be interpreted. That the speaker of the poem was most likely mad, and with such madness, whether he could truly have loved the woman he was holding, or if it was possession he sought through her murder.

In the year since she had left school, Rebecca had not read any poems that were not in her game. She had not been asked to.

They had twenty minutes to write some additional answers in their workbooks, and then the unseen poem came up on the interactive whiteboard in front of the class.

‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’.

They were going to go along as before and read a line each.

The work began with the poet standing before a forest, before trees owned by a local man. The poet thought it was unlikely he would be spotted here, since the land’s owner lived in town, away from this property, from this lonely road. The poet knew he should not be seen watching the man’s trees, his possessions. The night was almost silent. The snow rested among the trees, settling on each branch, each root, each hidden creature.

The next line was about a horse.

Or, more specifically, how the poet’s horse probably found it strange to stop like this so far from any human habitation, near a lake, on this coldest, blackest night. Except it wasn’t the horse that thought it strange – it was the poet, expressing his ideas through the imagination of an animal. Animals didn’t think things were strange. Animals didn’t think at all.

But something was wrong, wasn’t it? Something was wrong with the person speaking.

It wasn’t Robert Frost who spoke, at least not now. He had lived and died long ago, leaving this creation, words on a page that couldn’t speak. All these voices, they existed only in the reader’s mind.

It was them. Rebecca, her teacher, this whole class . . . they were much like the horse itself: imagined proxies for an abandoned thought, dancing in a mirror in a mirror in a mirror. The old words skipped through time. When they read aloud, they were puppets of the dead.

She imagined the man’s hands in her skull, moving her neck, opening her jaw.

From across the class, a girl turned briefly, looking right at her. The expression on her face was different from all the others.

Rebecca picked up her water bottle and drank.

Then the horse asked if something had gone wrong. There was no answer but its own asking, and the soft fall of snow in the breeze.

Her father had slapped her across the face, a month before he had died.

They focused a lot on Frost’s final lines.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

‘What is this poem about?’ the teacher asked.

No one answered.

‘What do you think it is about?’

No one answered.

The teacher, frustrated, began to talk through the poem. She told them that on the surface, it seems