The golden horse was broken. It was a palomino, but she hadn’t known that at the time. She had only blindly loved it as her favorite, had been so since she was little and it had pranced with the other horses along the mahogany mantle beside her grandfather’s rocker. For decades the horse galloped through her dreams. Sometimes she clung to his back and other times she raced beside him, her hair and his mane mingling in wind-driven meadow grasses. He was her talisman, her savior, her protector. Now his pieces sprawled broken within crumpled tissue. The movers had said, “Sorry" and had themselves moved on.
Vera hummed as she worked, composing a private melody, lullaby-soft as she glued the horse together. She pricked her thumb on one of the shards, but so intent was she on her task that she never noticed, and her blood seeped into the porcelain, staining the roughness of the broken leg. On a scrap of paper, a scrid really, she jotted a few tiny words to her grandfather, like birdsong on a summer’s day, the thinnest quill of message to take flight, and she rolled up the paper and stuffed it into the hollow leg. The glue from the hot gun singed her fingers while she stoically pinched the fragments tight until the golden horse was able to stand once again. His neck was arched and his mane flowed as gloriously as ever and his right foreleg pawed the air. He was her only family now. There would be no others. Not since the miscarriage. Never more since Darrell had kicked her down the stairs. Today her limp was hardly noticeable, and the outer scars were only the lines holding her pieces together.
Each thing she did she did reflexively as if done many times before, without thinking, yet it was as if the first time for everything. Vera had no use for time.
A rusty Socony emblem ornamented the side of a friendly barn in the island village of Bright Harbor where waves kissed the seaweed shores with the passion of a promise. A single railroad spike pivoted through the horse’s back on that metal sign so whenever the wind gusted in from the east, sneaking underneath the steel, the horse reared in place, surging forward, never gaining, forever pinned to a barn which offered him no shelter. Every day Vera waved gaily at the horse on her way to school and every day the horse pranced back in answer. She asked her grandfather what it meant, the red horse with the wings, and when he told her the story of Pegasus, she said, “ That’s what I’ll name my golden horse. He is Pegasus. He can fly. He don’t need no wings. The old man smiled and corrected her grammar.
The enchanted paths of fairy tale islands can twist and turn and often darkness falls too early. A hurricane of remarkable ferocity ripped the metal horse free from his barn, and he sailed through the gusts to the open ocean, lost forever, drifting on the outgoing tide. The same ill wind, a rain-slicked road, a hair-pin curve, a washed-out bridge, and Vera suddenly lost her human family as well. Only she and her grandfather remained.
The accident aged him from vigorous to elderly before his time, and he shrank to no more than a husk, fishing by day, mechanically placing supper on the table by night, attending to life by rote. Without womanly attention, Vera’s clothes grew disheveled and her braids flopped undone in stringy abandon on her hunched shoulders. Rather than a place of friendship and learning, for her the island school became merely a place to be endured, and she increasingly withdrew into the magic of her daydreams. Living in a house crammed with books and chatting with the imaginary friends on the pages set the little girl still further apart. Neighbors were sparse in Bright Harbor, surrounded on all sides by inlets, outlets, and open ocean. When humans huddle together like seals on a rock, hostilities can inbreed and what may pass for civility masks core-deep animosity. “She’s right peculiar, that one, --they all said. “Still, it’s a shame,-- they all muttered. “But what can you do?" They all shook their heads and went about their business.
Vera climbed an oak tree with a book in her teeth, squinted down through the leaves at the life passing below her and pretended not to care. Other girls giggled and held hands as they walked, and she yearned to pelt them with acorns, but they continued unmolested on their way to birthday parties and sleepovers and those things that were shared. She perched on a sun-warmed granite ledge overlooking the ocean, and spread books around her like friends at a picnic. She lay spread-eagled on her back in the field and talked to the shapes hidden within the cumulous. In the evenings from the mantel Pegasus and the other horses watched her read and dream, and their shadows grew huge on the opposite wall, and when she flickered the lamp, they galloped. Smoke from the old man’s pipe circled, crawled its apple- scented self through the light, and caressed the shadows of the horses on the wall, clouds for them to climb. It seemed a simple childhood, yet Vera was not a simple child. Her mind churned with mythology and metaphor and she would scan the distant horizon like a shipwrecked sailor to discover angels and horses within the fog. Winged beings of deliverance.
When the rifts in his heart ultimately cracked through to a fatal fault, the old man passed on a rather prosperous chuck of this world to Vera, so she continued to study and survive in the book-filled house on the bluff beside the sunlit fields and shared her dreams with Pegasus. On those rare social occasions when she attended church, a town meeting, a funeral, Vera would slink deeper into the shadows, a wallflower at a perennial eighth-grade dance whose homemade dress whimpered of poverty and innocence. A child whose scrubbed face eagerly awaited life while stinging from its slap. Only the shadows were friendly to Vera, soft and welcoming as a grandmother’s bosom on a tear-filled afternoon. Lacking a grandmother, and now even a grandfather, she hugged her shadows close as substitute. The tread of years tiptoed along until alone became lonely, and books and porcelain figurines lent chilly comfort when her body yearned for the warmth of human embrace.
Summer meadows in Maine glow timeless with buttercups and paintbrush, framed edges welcoming secrets in the black-green shadows of juniper and pine, places for lust and love and the cravings of youth which are born and die on the whim of the wind from the harbor. Vera had met Darrell in such a field on such a summer, and it was in such a dark place at the border of the light that she had first fallen in love. He was her golden knight, her prince, her future. For him, she was. Only that. Only was.
Days mild as magic passed that year when she was in love. The lights of the bait shop on the wharf twinkled with the romance of Broadway when Darrell came in from clamming. As he slid down her jeans, Vera was enraptured by the symphony of the gulls and the perfume of stale fish, and no heaven could ever have been sweeter. One Saturday he crewed on a tourist sailboat, hustled a bit extra in tips and, in a generous mood, treated Vera to dinner at a railroad-car diner on the mainland. She ordered hesitantly, prudently opting for meatloaf while Darrell sawed into the rib-eye, and there in the privacy of the back corner booth, cradled in cracked vinyl, he presented her with a gold-plated chain bearing a diamond-chip heart from the pawn shop, and declared it was time he moved in with her. She was the luckiest girl in the world, and she traced another heart of her own in the spilled sugar on the faux-marble formica. The neon diner sign winked erratic red bursts onto the sugar heart. She couldn’t read the words the red letters spelled.
In whatever manner time is measured, Darrell replaced the books, the horses, the introspective nights and the magical days, with noise and grease and the never-ending debris of his chainsaw mind. Cartons stuffed with Vera’s former life soon overflowed the barn, their permanent extinction threatened on a daily basis. With each encroachment she retreated farther and with each retreat his presence expanded until her life was his, which was no life at all. Those warm embraces debased into drunken grapplings, thence to hellfire bullyings and daily pummelings. She knew no refuge but the life inside her, that of her family yet-to-be, that and the privacy of her imagination. Like the golden horse, the whisper of her grandfather’s gentle kiss upon her forehead ghosted her dreams, reassuring her when Darrell became violent.
On a stifling night in July she dream-raced with Pegasus through cool mountain air, yet the dream warped into the surprise of nightmare as his swirling mane strangled her, and she awoke with Darrell flattened atop her, twisting the belt of her bathrobe tight around her throat. She was gagging, struggling for breath, flailing out, wrenching away from him, falling, struggling up, slapped back down, struggling up again. A punch to her ear drove her reeling into the bureau, grabbing the embroidered scarf, sending toiletries flying, scattering the floor with broken glass. She slid down and sat stunned amid the litter of her life, blood seeping like tiny twinkling jewels from the glass shards in her flesh. He pulled her upright and backhanded her, repeatedly, while she swayed in slow motion like a child’s weighted toy, unable to fall, unable to flee. He said nothing. She made no cries. The only sound was the slapping, the hitting, the breaking. Flesh to flesh, bone to bone. Tired from his efforts, Darrell dragged her into the hall and kicked her down the stairs, where she lay curled in an impossibly small heap, and the twinkling red jewels became a monstrous red ruby.
The staircase was not long in the old house, but it was steep in the way of old houses, and by the time they found her she had hemorrhaged to the point of coma. The ferry was ponderously slow and
the baby never lived to see landfall. Vera was herself transitional as her gurney sped feet-first into the operating room. It was days before she was able to speak, and it was months before she cared.
She had been a small girl and she remained a small woman, quiet to her soul. At the sentencing --- when Darrell yelled, “I’ll kill you, you sorry bitch!" --- people assured her that, “It’s what they all say, honey. He don’t mean nothin’ by it. Bet he’s some sorry. Bet he still loves you." Vera knew better and transplanted whatever remained of her life onto the mainland three counties away, putting two rivers, several lakes, and many miles between them.
No, Darrell would never find her here. Not in this part of the state. Last she had heard he was working part-time at the hardware store on Main Street in Thomaston, close by his prison home of the past two years. He should have drawn more time for what he’d done, but the state was embarrassed by domestic violence, and the murder of her unborn was no more than a shrug of hard luck to the jury. Manslaughter at best. Unintentional, anyone could see that. Vera placed the restored golden horse on the mantel of this new home. He pranced alone, owning his surroundings, proud of his scars.
Now, tonight, Vera dreams of the horse, resurrected. Unscathed, she rides him through the clouds, but tonight instead of gold, the horse is red, a pulsing crimson rich as sunrise.
She is alerted to the sound of the door glass breaking. This modest fifties ranch has no stairs, and her bedroom is a house-length away from the door, yet she can hear the man breathing, a monstrous sound that sullies the clean air with the filth of whatever it is that composes the core of Darrell. He seizes control as always and walks confidently though this house, her new home, not as an intruder, not as a murderer and a batterer, but with the arrogance of the lord of the manor. This time he calls out. This time he sings. “Vera. Veeeera. You can’t hide any more. Time to pay the piper, Vera. Time to ante up. You owe me, Vera. You gotta pay."
But this time Vera too has found her voice. “You. Are. Scum. Darrell. You murderer. No, Darrell you bastard, it’s time for you to pay." Vera has no weapon, nothing beyond the hatred that fills the empty spots within her, yet she draws herself up proudly, and she wears her limp and her scars as medals, and she walks naked from the bedroom to face her monster.
The orange flickers from the gas log in the hearth and the blue half-light of the snow swirling through the broken window caress her skin, clothing her form in jewels of fire and of ice. She glows and the immediate air pulsates ever so softly.
“Darrell," she croons. “Darrell. Don’t you want to see the masterpiece you have made of my body? Don’t you want to view your handiwork? It’s something, isn’t it, Darrell, how many ways flesh can be broken. And this is only the wrapping. Only the outside. I have no insides anymore. Do you Darrell, do you have any insides? Did you ever? Can we see?"
The man scowls and lowers his head slightly, like a bull about to charge. This is unexpected. She has never answered back before, only cowered and flinched, his forever-victim. There is something here his does not like, something that makes the small hairs rise and tingles the nerves at the base of his spine. Something unforeseen.
“Well, Vera. If you want me, you gotta do some better than that." Darrell manages a tiny snort that translates more as a whine. “You never was really much of a looker, but you’ve sure as hell let yourself go."
The man advances no farther and the woman stands still as well, yet the air about her continues its movements, a tiny squall, a vibration.
“Darrell." She says it only once, but the name echoes through the room like a chant and her voice is backed by many voices --- voices that speak with the pounding of her veins emptying her blood onto the floor of the old house, voices that echo with the stilled heartbeat of their never-breathing child. “Darrell. Darrell."
The man draws his eyebrows together still tighter, inclines towards her, clenches his fists, considers a single menacing step. The pulsing grows louder, measured bursts of rage rimmed in colors of fire and ice. The corners of the room deepen and become rounded and something in time very violently shifts. The man craves his revenge, yet his hatred is a paltry thing next to the forces unleashed on a snow-filled night in a small house in Maine.
Vera is a tiny woman-child, but she fills the room, recedes to normal size, fills the room again. She is solid, not solid, a pulsing fury and now the man shines with fear-sweat and cocks his head back ever so slightly. The pounding of his own heart thrumps loudly, erratic in the way of terror.
“Darrell. Darrell."
“You bitch," he mutters. “What kinda trick is this?" He wears the stink of his vileness like a shield.
“Goddamn, you, Vera. I’ll get you for this crap." He takes that step forward.
The air sizzles and the room strobes and the floor and the ceiling give way until there is only light and vibration and a noise the sound of centuries, rage gathered to crescendo, justice as lightening. Eyes and wings and clouds and creatures of fire and wrath. And from the center erupts a vast horse, a winged stallion, and his coat glistens as a heart jewel, and his hooves show the man no mercy until the man is also red, and the room is overcome by silence.
Except for the man and his redness, the house is abruptly empty and snow drifts in through the broken glass of the door.
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