
A Dead White Pony by Debra Di Blasi
The Shetland could not help herself from helping herself to summer fescue under hoof. The waxy, sugared grasses tasted so fine and grew so plentiful, and since we did not corral the horses, they had their reign: three hundred acres of fertile pastures at their toothy mercy.
And, mercy, that pony could eat!
Once, we played circus upon her ample back widened by a belly so round she always looked with foal. No reins, no harness, just a lawn of clover and dandelions and bluegrass she’d munch down to the crown while I balanced atop her spine, one foot raised, ballast of arms extended: my one trick on that froward pony. A sister sang the circus song—Dunt-dunt duddle-uddle lunt-dunt duhn-duh . . . A brother played ringmaster. Flies gathered. Summer moved on.
By fall the pony had foundered: hooves grown long and curling back toward the coffin bones shifting. And still, she ate. She ate until the grasslands grew yellow and the weather turned chill. And when the other horses, healthy, left the high pastures for the low, fallowed fields, she couldn’t follow on her feverish feet.
For weeks, it seems now in her forever haunting of me, she stood atop a hillock calling and calling to the other horses, until her whinnies became whickers, and she then went silent in an equine desolation profound as the black of her rheumy eyes.
(A pony feels loneliness and thereby longing. A pony feels. You cannot tell me different.)
That Shetland threw me the first time I tried to ride her, and every damn time after when I giddy-upped her flanks to turn her from ceaseless grazing. Yet I loved her more than I then loved my father who said, “There’s nothing can be done,” and sold her to the knackery where they’d render her corpse for dog food and detergent, and maybe a batch of glue from the overgrown hooves.
My last time with her the sky stood gray over us. Leaves fell. Already the pond life had sunk in mud for winter, the cattails gone brittle. So much she did not understand of existence (less even than I?), like how she came to be, and came to be on a farm otherwise generous, and be abandoned by a herd of horses who were all she knew to be a part of, and how their absence could become another herd—stampede of loneliness that trampled her wasting body.
The knacker was coming.
I brushed the length of her spine and the ghost-white hair came away into the wind, as she was already disappearing.
Debra Di Blasi is an award-winning author of six books. Her awards include a Thorpe Menn Book Award, Diagram Innovative Fiction Award, & NOW Award. Her writing has appeared in many prominent journals and anthologies of innovative fiction, with adaptations to film and radio. She is a former art columnist, educator, and publisher. www.debradiblasi.com
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