it's strange what desire will make foolish people do. He releases her, but she still feels trapped. She can feel him, the weight of him, inside her heart, pulling her down; her name still runs across her skin, makes her tingle as if it is acid. When he lets her go, sends her away to find her mother (she does not know if she goes because she wants to, or because he wants her to), she backs up quickly, as if some spell was keeping her legs stuck to the ground.
But he is still there.
She rushes back to the place where she left her mother, but everything has changed. There are different horses here; she wasn’t with her mother for long, but she knows her colour, her smell (though the smell has been tainted by him, it is now edged with something dark and rotting and bleak). She stumbles on green-and-red legs as the hope she had allowed to fill her up is ripped out. She calls out, loudly, but she doesn’t know the name she should be shouting, so she just has to make as much noise as she can.
Her spirit breaks before her throat goes sore.
She falls, a green-and-red thing with a name that fits like a strait-jacket, weeping. She should never have left (but go back in time and would she do it again?), she should have clung to her mother because her mother would have clung to her. They would be together, now, and this fist around her heart, this hunger that rakes her stomach, they would not be here. Only her mother would be here.
She wouldn’t see his face every time she closed her eyes. ELVE
Not this troublous
Wringing of hands,
this dark Ceiling without a star.
She could feel it – him or her – moving impatiently there, in that final crook of their inside home.
And though she had never done this before, she was impelled to lay and rise and walk and finally nestle onto her side and straighten her legs out, by something beyond deliberation.
And heave, putting everything into those long pushes, in symphony with the vice ache of her birthing muscles contracting.
It did not take long, or so it seemed to her.
The preparation had been the hardest part.
This had been easy. It was warm muscles and cold earth,
When she peered over her ribs at the damp place behind her, there was bright red and green. She smiled, shifting to her belly and forelegs, tucking her knees in and pressing her hooves into the ground. ‘Hello,’ she cooed gently, shaking to her legs, and turning ‘round to finish off the membranous afterbirth.
But it was gone. He or she.
Falla blinked, panic clenched in her gut. ‘Baby?’
Through the trees and oceans of grass and winter’s melt, flashed red and green.
Off and on.
Red and green.
Moving away from her and their nest.
* * *
She slides to a stop, breathing hard. He, or she, could not have gone far – not on those young legs. But the forest is vast and dense, and the meadow is wide, and somehow she had not tracked her child down, yet. Her wild morning had been spent delivering and searching every nook and cranny of the woodland for a newborn. Tirelessly.
Then she remembers – flickering in and out, like a shadow in candlelight…
Like something that barely exists, so she begins to doubt it all…
But she had felt every tight muscle in her abdomen. The dilation and the relief thereafter.
(– but… She had seen. For a second, and then another. Red and green.)
So she searches on, because the exhaustion in her muscles and the grass and dirt that still clings to the sweat on one side says she is a mother. She moves from the white birches and into the sway of grass. “Baby!” she calls out, because she has no other name.
That is the deepest cut of all.
The pink and green mare draws the concerned and disturbed stares of those mulling about, their own children stuck to their sides as if glued to place, or sleeping by their feet soundly; someone stops and asks her if they can help, but she can only say she has lost a child she cannot see, and with pitying clucks they let her be.
When she hears the calls – shrill, small yelps, fumbling to make contact with someone she hardly knows and yet needs so fundamentally – Falla reels around, her eyes wide and bloodshot. She knows the tone and pitch as if it is an inborn song. When she finally gets near enough to touch her (red and green – her now, she can see) she stumbles to her knees, ripping the skin, her legs shaking as if just now realizing the strain of their own exertion.
“Why would you..? Where did you go?!” she breaths out, raw-throated and angry, pushing her nose into the girl’s neck.
“Don’t you do that ever again! You scared me to death.”
Falla
it's strange what desire will make foolish people do. She thinks, for a second, it is one of his tricks, when she sees her. She thinks that this whole thing has been one of his tricks, teaching her a lesson for wanting to leave him. In such a short time he has so wholly enveloped her life, that she fears she will never be able to rid herself of him; he named her, and that’s an honour which should be carried out only by a parent.
Maybe that is what he wants from her. To be her parent (but what parent would treat their child like he has treated her) and for her to depend on him, and only him.
He would not have been far off if she hadn’t seen the pink and green coat flashing through the trees. Trick or not, the green-and-red girl can see her mother again.
She tries to turn, but the ground is holding her down, keeping her exhausted body for itself. She can call out though, and a voice returns to her, moves towards her; the filly struggles to her hooves only to fall again a second later. She is too young, too tired, too afraid to fight back, so she lays there, calling for the mother that she will finally have once more.
She fears that he is here, too - she heard a noise, under the cries of her mother, that scraping, dragging sound; perhaps she is merely imagining it. It has been a stressful start to her life, it would not be unusual for her to be hearing things that aren’t there, seeing things that cannot be there.
The mare falls beside her, and all other thoughts are pushed from the filly’s mind.
She knows that she has done wrong, that her mother is angry with her, but she is too relieved to fear what will happen to her - this is her mother, and her mother will never creep under her skin, never make the green-and-red girl tremble and cower. No, she will be safe now, she must be, because her mother will protect her from all the bad things in this world.
“I’m sorry, mamma,” she whispers through sobs, once more struggling to her feet and this time succeeding, pushing herself closer to the pink and green mare, burrowing her face in her mother’s coat. She will never leave again, because leaving leads to terrors and nightmares and monsters.
She thought she was brave and bold and stubborn, but it turns out that she is just another scared little girl who wants to stay by her mother’s side for as long as she can.
She would be disappointed in herself if she wasn’t so relieved. ELVE
Not this troublous
Wringing of hands,
this dark Ceiling without a star.
She breathes.
She can breathe.
She does it deep into her ribs and out across her green neck in a shutter, choked up by the want to cry. She picks herself up from her ungraceful bow, her knees stinging, finally getting a look at her – all baby bones and angles, awkward in the way her legs are too long and her head too big for her thin neck. As she should be. Somehow, unharmed; somehow untouched by her travels, or so Falla thinks and so she breathes a sigh of relief.
“It’s fine,” it is not, but she’d rather baby think so than think she is angry at her. She is, and is not. Mostly, she is relieved and still confused. And so motherhood, in its first yawning blinks, shows itself to be complicated and wrenching. “You just scared me. It’s fine.”
How do you ask someone so new to explain themselves?
(This thing they are doing is hard, for her and for the girl. This new dance.) She looks around at the prying eyes that have come to the scene like emotional vultures and her ears peel back to her neck, warning them away. This is easy. This comes to her no matter how new; maybe more so, because she knows what it is like to lose her. Never again.
“So where did you go then, hm?” She tries to allow levity into her voice. As if inquiring about a great adventure with greater interest. She seems shaken and troubled, deeply. Falla presses her muzzle into her – neck and the whorl in the middle of her forehead – to try and calm her.
It would be a scary thing, indeed. To be alone at her age.
‘Did you get lost?’
‘Did you find help out there?’
‘Did you meet anyone?’
She keeps them to herself for now, so as not to overload baby. And because, in part, the answers scare her with their potential. She looks over her, a quivering smile on her lips, inviting. She wants to know everything.
So thinks she wants to know everything.
Falla
it's strange what desire will make foolish people do. She doesn’t want to move, she wants to stay here for as long as she can, with her mother relieved and not angry or upset or disappointed. That one hurts the most; disappointment. The others will pass, eventually, but disappointment sinks into the bones of both parties, and sits there, forever, waiting to be relived at any moment.
Though she does not know any of this yet, as she is too young, and much of her experiences with horses has been the avoidance of anger. This is all she knows, and her mother’s relief washes over her, starting to cleanse her (though her soul will never - can never - be truly cleaned).
The questions start but stop just as quickly. She doesn’t understand parenthood, how this should work, but if the girl left him for too long it would never be one simple question. It would be speeches and looks and anger, so much anger, and she would cower silently until he decided what he would do with her.
Usually, he would do nothing, and this was somehow worse.
“I don’t know,” she says simply, because she doesn’t know; she went this way and then that way and then down the rabbit hole to lose her innocence.
And there she met the maddest of the hatters and the reddest of the queens and the most cheshire of the cats and it was all rolled into one horse.
She doesn’t know if she should mention him (she should, she is certain, but she is scared, scared that talking of him will bring him). So she stays silent, pressing herself as close to her mother as she can, as if she could just start again, this life, this short time that has felt so long.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, mumbling into her mother’s brightly coloured side. “I’ll never do it again,” she promises, but even as the words leave her mouth she knows that this is not a promise she will be able to keep.
But she will try, for as long as she can. ELVE
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