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

each other, like spooning lovers, and I poured in the hot syrup. I lowered each jar into the boil bath canner and flushed at the steam, pushed up my long john sleeves. The rolling boil cast a gentle sound, steaming the room looser with the scent of hot furless peach.

I showered and put on the mint dress I’d worn to Darrell’s wake, then changed into jeans and a red blouse. Afterward, I pulled out the warm jars, halfmoons in syrup floating upward to each lid. Late morning. I would take a quart to Dillon, wait at his grandmother’s until he landed his pesticide plane. I didn’t know what I’d do or say if Nan was there. I wrapped the hot jar in a towel so I could set it on the truck’s bench seat, but the phone rang just before I pushed out the screen door.

“You ever have an ache that calls for its phantom limb?” asked Mave.

“No,” I said. “Where have you been?” I hadn’t followed up after the co-op and felt the guilt sting.

“I think you should come over,” she said.

“I’m busy. And it’s early for a drink, isn’t it?”

“Just come.”

So I took the hot jar of peaches and drove to Mave’s, and decided I would seek Dillon after.

The hydrangea off the left side of her junked-up porch still had one blossom. The near-noon light struck it, like a bell, and so the living room was more noticeably dark and dismal when I entered. No Mave, only your storehouse of books, Ruth, with their grayed tongues sticking out, places she’d marked for passages that had spoken her life into being. She had bedded me down in that living room once, on couch cushions on the floor, when she’d first moved back—remarkably, it had been the cleanest room in the house. I lay that night wrapped in a wool blanket pulled from a chest of camphor blankets and afghans, a kid in a cocoon, papers scattered under the cushions—Leave them, it’s okay, she’d said. There were places in the books that would utter me, too, though I hadn’t known that then. But lying in my cocoon, I’d heard the books’ murmur and had scratched my ears for the tickle. I’d heard the chaos and the anthem.

Jar of peaches in hand, I smelled an odor like diesel. The same old circulars and plastics and wilting philodendrons lay scattered around my feet, TV guides and a Matlick Feed ball cap and empty pretzel bags.

“I have an ache that calls for its phantom limb,” she said from the kitchen. I followed her voice.

“Brought you some peaches,” I said.

“A drink?”

“Is that why you called me?” Having worked myself up to finally see Dillon, I couldn’t mask my irritation.

She wore her ratty robe, her gray hair a spritz around her head. Nothing underneath the robe, it seemed. Some cleavage, no compression, some softness. I looked away by reflex. She picked at the lid rim on the unringed jar I’d set before her. One robe sleeve was pushed up. I saw she wore an X of white tape at her inner elbow, a cotton ball. As if blood had been drawn.

“My pipes are no good,” Mave said.

“Rex will look at them. Probably a dead squirrel in the line again. I told you to put that screen on the intake at the spring.”

“These pipes.” She patted her chest. She put her hand out to say sit. I sat.

Ruth—what parts would you want to know? Those that are unreal because too real? Those you’d prefer without detail? Without diagnosis?

“I had a peculiar pain,” she said, “so I got it checked out.”

“Who took you?” I swiped at a moth stuck in liquid on the table.

“AWOL took me.”

“Ron?”

“During his lunch. He’s back working for the State now.”

“Yeah, Clay told me.”

“Highway flagger again. Slow, Stop, Slow, Stop. He won’t tell Miranda on me.”

“Tell her what?”

“Otherwise I’d be lambasted for waiting too long.”

“Tell Miranda what?”

“That I have stage four lung cancer.”

In my skull a great sudden pressure, like a tamping down. I said nothing. She studied the peaches. I felt as though the pressure would spill me out at my edges, so I rubbed my arms, containing myself. Strangely, I could not feel her near, though she was right there across the table. Her robe fell a bit more open to almost bare her abused left breast.

She said, “I love words with two contexts that metaphorically mirror. Think about trough—a trough of a wave that follows the crest, and a trough for slopping hogs. You work those toward sameness.” With a spoon, she gently popped the newly sealed lid from the quart jar and scooped out peach halves onto two soiled plates. I put my head down on my forearm on the table. I felt her sweep pieces of my clean hair away from my plate.

Once, Ruth, as a teen, I’d told her I found my life disappointing.

“Your life?” she’d said. “What’s yours about it? The ham hock legs sticking out of your shorts?” I asked her whose it was then, but she never said.

DID YOU EVER WANT TO EMPTY YOURSELF LIKE A BOOT with small rocks in it—shake it out and start over? Did you ever want a new name? Hydrangea. Hibiscus. Horse. Horsehair. Did you ever want to be less alone and more like the Ellafritz girls who nurse each other’s sons? Well, you never knew the Ellafritz girls, so probably not. I want aloneness and also to be less alone—that fat, divergent greed. When you traversed the Sinai, did the desert scrub take away the confused wanting, or intensify it? Where the stars are clarified and the water more secret. The air unhumid and undense and unswampy, breath coming in like wind through a screenless window, carrying neither wasp nor fruit fly.

We didn’t leave Interstate 40 through Arkansas, as though the state’s territory was somehow off-limits. It was hairy around Little Rock, but the rest was a mindless four hours. The trees did finally thin. This