Listen to the author reading this story:
The filly was born perfect. Almost impossible to believe – all those months, your favorite mare growing wide, your one chance, one arrogant dare since all those dreams as a boy, and here you’d done it: made money enough to pay to breed your horse. Bred the perfect foal. Those impossible legs, all tangled, and yet she was up and walking, just as they said, in only an hour. Gleaming copper coat. Muscled. That sculpted head. That one perfect star on her forehead.
It was an expensive hobby, the horse. Bad as golf or boats or hunting, the hours away from your marriage. An hour each way, out into the country. You: your window down, smelling the passing grains, even the sour dairy muck. Outside. Outside, and out in the country. Stalls rented at the farm with a white wooden barn shaped the way barns were once all shaped. A collie that ran snapping at you as you got out of your car. Smell leather. Grass. Sawdust shavings. Sweat. Molasses of the fistful of grain you’d dig from the barrel in the feed room and hold out to that impossibly chiseled muzzle. The filly. The filly you’d brought into being. Gleaming chestnut like a lightbulb against her mother’s dark flank, and that perfect white star on her forehead.
Your wife had been in hospital, you told the filly, her lips velvet and careless in your palm. Fibroids, something. Some thing causing her pain, needing surgery, costing money, her pain, needing recovery. The filly stood as you haltered her, as you taught her to cross tie. Let you brush her coat, her mother scolding nearby. She’ll be alright, you said. Repeating, in fact, what your wife had told you: It doesn’t change a thing. This is just one of those things. You run the course. You recover.
You were reluctant, telling your wife: there was something wrong with the filly’s legs. Nothing you’d noticed those first months. Didn’t show up that first year, hours you spent at the rail of the paddock, watching her zoomies, watching her kick. Watching the filly race her mother, now lean and in demand – the breeder wanting to buy her, to breed her on, as good as this filly had come out. All those hours you spent, away from your marriage, nothing to do but stand and watch. Watch your perfect filly run on grass. And those were the words your wife had used, your wife now healing, almost free of the pain. There’s something about running on grass, she said. Let the thing run its course.
And so you had. The mare sold on to the breeder. The filly – now full grown but too young to saddle. Your largest investment, was she not? The time. The money put into her. Money it cost every month: board, feed, veterinarian – and that, you were aware, even if your wife was not, was an increasing expense. X-rays. Bone sample. Medications. Splints. It was that the cannon bone did not sit properly into the knee, so as the filly carried her weight, over time, here and there, she went lame. Turn her out on grass, your wife suggested. Yes, the vet agreed. Leave her to run. Something to be said for simply letting her run on grass. Give her time to grow. Things run their course.
Your filly. Impossibly gleaming chestnut flame, blazing out across the thick of that green pasture. One year. Two. She trotted to you across the field. Stood for the leather halter to fit over her ears, the carrots, the brush at the crosstie. Old enough to ride but still. The pain in her legs.
Your wife is angry with you. This many years in. Children near grown. There’d been a woman in HR you barely knew, one you used your nicest voice with because she handled insurance. Expense reports. Pay checks. Time off. Because she had been the one to start the collection to help with your wife’s medical bills. She’d also offered to blow you. Let’s call it what it was. But that’s all it was. You’d laughed awkwardly. Said, Really? as if she’d caught you off guard. As if you’d go out with your expense check in hand, maybe a candy from the dish, but that would be all you’d take with you. You’d gone home to your wife – who was back to herself now. Healed, thank god, because it had just been one of those things, had run its course.
Only. You may have turned the woman down, but she mailed a letter to your wife all the same. Sad cow, she’d called her. We laugh about you, so pathetic holding on, but he is mine. Your wife left the letter out for you. On the counter. With the opened vet bill. She’d found a box of condoms in your dresser, set those out, too. And you stare at her, trying to think how to say you’d bought them – before the fibroids, before the pain, before the surgery – because you’d been too afraid to have sex and get her pregnant again. The children. The all of it, being SO MUCH.
But how do all these truths sound like lies?
You get behind the wheel because it’s time to drive out to the barn. The flash of copper on grass, that perfect filly. The one perfect thing you’d gotten far enough in life, far enough past childish dreams, to make happen. The mare. The barn. The stud fee. The safe gestation. The added feed, larger stall, supervision, veterinarian. The grass. The grass.
That long drive out between the last of family farms. No more of that, is there? Families all together on a farm?
Your wife calls you, voice choked with sobs. Believing. Believing the crazed font of the typed, unsigned letter from the HR woman whose burgundy hair made you think of Halloween costumes, who was no one you’d have chosen. Not something you’d have planned. Nothing you’d have dreamed of, planned and worked into being. No star in your life. Not like her.
Not now, you say. The vet is waiting, you say. When I’m home, you say. Need the silence of the car, windows up. Drive out to the barn. Flash of copper, flash of star, as if there were maybe still a chance.
But it’s time. Done running.
Half up the driveway, you could see it there already, in a perfect blade of evening sun cutting past that perfect barn. Golden glow lighting the metal arm of the crane, tread of the digger. International Harvester resting, having dug the perfect hole. Far back beyond the thickest grass, beyond where she ran. That one thing you’d made, so impossibly bright against the green, copper glint of boyhood hope. Park beside the veterinarian’s van. Imperfect bones that would always be nothing but pain. Flawed legs couldn’t be outgrown. Collie biting your ankles. Vet’s grip on your shoulder. When you’re ready, walk her in.
Elissa Field has been responsible for sorting thousands of family photos which unearthed memories of many of the horses from when there were still farms in the family. She writes literary noir, in short and long fiction. Her work has earned numerous fellowships and awards, with stories appearing in SmokeLong Quarterly, CRAFT, Peatsmoke, Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, Conjunctions, BULL, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. She has novel and story collections underway. Far from farm country, she now lives in an historic house under an ancient mango tree with her sons, cats, and collie. Find writing and social media links at elissalaurenfield.com.
The ending was heart-wrenching.