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

outgrown full-blown asthmatic attacks. I stacked two pancakes on my plate and felt the weak lung and the urge to run. My feet tested the spring offered in the linoleum.

I could always run fast as a kid, especially during the years I played basketball. I went nights to the school gymnasium to run suicides in the green glow of the emergency lights—baseline, foul line, half court, again, then some pretend one-on-one to work on my layup, to work on my lung power.

Clay made conversation about the gospel band, about his bass player Stew getting a new amp—but I didn’t want to hear about dark-eyed, rangy Stew—and about my cousin Ron, one of Rex and Miranda’s twins, the one who stuttered, starting entry-level with the State that month, as if to say, See? We can talk like husband and wife over bacon in the kitchen.

What happened was strange, Ruth. The magma in me had bypassed the eruption and running-over, had transformed straight to ashes and a few cinders. My ashes shook down at the kitchen table. The hard No was a cinder left lodged there in the grate. I could not utter it. I should have uttered it.

Into my head pierced a sharp memory—I was a phantom point guard beating it to the baseline and dribbling like a crazy. The grade school box gym could contain me and channel me. Then, out into the night, heading home with a gym bag to Mother and Dad who were not yet specters but living people at sink and TV and supper, with a tub of Country Crock half full like Clay’s.

There was a bird. I sloughed my gym bag and shoes at the hearth. I unbanded my hair and wore it like a piece of clothing, my nubby basketball under my arm. Mother’s radio played, also the TV, but I heard flapping in the chimney. I put my ear to the cool stone. A bird is trapped, I said. It can’t fly out. She spoke to him acidly, Why didn’t you put wire mesh up there to keep them out? And he said, It’ll get free, Margot, it’s nothing to worry about. Tended the TV antenna with his gentle, limp hands. She pursed her face shut. Early fall, so there was no fire, only soot. The damper, when I tried it, was jammed fast, and the bird flapped like mad. It’s a warbler, I said, though how would I have known that? I did not see it yellow like a Christmas ball, but I did. It flapped and stirred the summer soot into a suffocating cloud, the frail wings scraping against the chimney wall and sparking. And then, after a time, silence. I stood there. She turned off the radio and wiped her apron with a disapproving air.

See? Dad said toward the TV, his voice always sounding shoved down in a bucket. They fly back out.

My mother’s face flint.

But wasn’t there yet a faint glowing heartbeat? Wasn’t there, Ruth, in the name warbler on my lips? I mouthed it, I whispered. Behind the stone and behind my eyes, it lived, barely. The silence did not mean escape. Silence meant the bird would join the others that came before it, that I’d pull the damper open one day and bird bones would hail down—how many skeletons in the chimney? A thought so horrible, my breath grew inaccessible, my throat a clogged straw. I bolted out the screen door in my sock feet, my mother righteously calling after, and ran from the bones I knew had piled there, not toward Mave’s next door but toward the woods and the Train Cave. I got into the nettles, I hit a hard locust tree and drew lip blood and ran on. I could run fast on very little breath at that age, did not yet need the paper bag to hyperventilate into. I could regulate it myself. I stopped only where the moss went black at the swamp edge. I followed its creeping boundary into the cave mouth, I ducked in and stood in the dark damp expanse of limestone. There was the silent wet wall, the long hush of things so previous to me and more hidden than myself. My lip bled. I wore a Nite Glo bracelet, a jelly wire my teammate Liza had given me, and one to Clarissa too, and it made light by itself. The warbler was in complete darkness and walled—it wheezed, I wheezed—yet, as I imagined it there, I saw it shimmering with light, so it, too, must have made light by itself, in the chimney soot. A self-generated glow.

Standing motionless in the limestone, in the strange cavern so high a train could pass, my girl torso, shoulders, narrow neck could have made a chimney, and there could have been dead birds in me. I breathed. Bats rustled high, my legs stung with nettle. The bones, the odd yellow light of the jelly bracelet. Feather and remnant. I touched the damp cave wall and wrote with my finger one of the hieroglyphs you had taught me in a letter, one of the tall hieratic signs, the cursive bird looking to the right.

Clay said he’d get down on one knee if I wanted. My sprinter feet eased down onto the linoleum of Lottie’s kitchen. I got as far as the nettle-feel on my calves under the jeans I wore now with the pretty white blouse. The nettle-feel was as far as I got before I stopped. In my stomach, a sharp frail thing went dull, wing into soot, but something stubbornly glowed. My throat opened, and I reached for the syrup and coated the cold pancake perfect in size and shape.

I knew love would not grow. But since I did not feel all that capable of love, I told him yes.

MY OWN HOUSE NEXT TO MAVE’S, the clapboard house I’d grown up in, had a fishhook floor plan and narrow stairs that climbed to no hallway, only to a room