don't think too much; ledger

[Spear + Spark]

the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky

Spark recoils from him - no, not him - his insistence that she has caused him some kind of harm though a single touch. Harm might be the least of it, she thinks, incredulous that she could sort of be bemused right now as angered as she is by how he pummels her with question after question as if she had bewitched him. She! Of all the horses in the land, lowly Spark could bewitch someone with a touch of her small whiskery muzzle. Now she scoffs, still braced against further accusations that she had done something to him, every breath still forcefully huffed out of her like a derailed locomotive.

 

She stares him down from beneath her forelock, but begins to notice a change come over him - something like defeat? His eye dulls, his muzzle slumps to his chest and before she knows it, she’s lost him behind his own forelock and she flings hers up and away from her eyes, her own stance less bracing now. He asks her about power, and mentions a curse before collapsing inward on himself and she knew then, it was truly defeat that had taken him so quickly after his own anger. Anger, like fire, cleanses and exhausts, as she is learning and it almost pained her to see him so small and lost like that. “No power,” she murmurs, emboldened enough to reach out towards him again… “What curse?” she queries, close enough to blow a breath out upon his face.

 

Then she turns from him, all in an instant! She performs an about-face and paces out a safe distance from him before answering, “I’m just a mare and I just wanted to talk.” It is easier to show him, only because she doesn’t know how to explain it to him - that she had caught her beloved in a quarrel with his sister after having knocked her up with twins, or how he’s disappeared and left her? That afterwards, she grew so full of spite it made her belly ache as if she’d had too much grass or a bad apple. So full of spite that she slept and dreamt and fevered her way into something new and uncontrollable?

 

“Look,” she implores him as she bursts into flame and there is little left that is recognizable of the medicine hat mare that Spark once was; now she is fire, and nothing else.

Spark