The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

The Lost Pony

The Lost Pony WEST TO THE mountains, east to the sea; I used to hear my lost pony running on the road at night, the pony I’d won at a raffle the day the Glen Allen Youth Center opened, the pony that brought me such brief glorious popularity and then jumped his fence and vanished. Run away or got stolen, who could tell? He haunted the road, invisible, gone wild. One time I woke up at dawn, got dressed, and went outside. Dew gleamed on the grass, so beautiful. Down the long driveway I sped toward the creek, sure I’d find the pony drinking the cold water. He wasn’t there. The milkman drove up the empty road and turned into my driveway.This was back when milk still came in bottles, capped with white paper. Waving and wide awake, the milkman passed me. He would drive up to my house and leave the milk on the porch, and I would drink it for breakfast.  Again I heard the pony’s hooves clip-clipping, and I took off after the sound, swerving left on Mountain Road (so narrow, back then, a child could nearly span it with one foot in each ditch), ran panting as far as the railroad tracks and waited as a train rushed by; leaped across the hot rails then and cocked my head to pick up the hoof sounds. They led me past the old hotel, the landmark I loved most of all, to the school, quaint, red brick, built in . My third-grade teacher, Miss Genevieve, was already there, out in the yard. “Why, Lyndoll,” she said, “it’s only six-thirty.” “I heard my horse,” I told her. “I was following him.” She had on my favorite dress, a gray one with yellow pockets . I had admired her ever since she’d clapped a stovepipe hat on her head to recite the Gettysburg Address. That morning, as if I’d done nothing unusual, she drove me home in her old black Plymouth, its fenders rounded like a camel’s humps. “You might still find that pony,” Miss Genevieve said. “At any rate, you’ll get beyond it,” meaning my loss. “Tell me about your lit-up hand,” I said, and she obliged with my favorite story. Her brother had worked in New Mexico , at a secret place where bombs were tested, called the Sandia Mountain Laboratory. Miss Genevieve had visited him and observed an explosion. “The flash was so terrible and bright, you could see every bone in your hand,” she said. She held her arm up in front of her face, demonstrating, in the safe Virginia morning. “I had on special glasses, yet still I could see my bones.” She stayed for breakfast at my house. I told my parents and my sisters, “Miss Genevieve had herself X-rayed by a bomb.” A hand lit by fire was what I wanted then, as much as I wanted my pony back. Now, what I wouldn’t give for break-  The Quick-Change Artist fast with Mama again, she who whispered, “I’ve been waiting for you” when I rushed stumbling into her hospital room that last time, last summer: Mama took those chemo treatments and didn’t even flinch. The morning I got up to chase the mysterious horse, Mama had cooked things to tempt my appetite : French toast, Tidewater brand herring roe from a can, and biscuits covered with golden-brown meringue, a recipe she’d invented to get her picky daughters to eat eggs, and which Miss Genevieve raved about. Mama didn’t know where my pony was, either. None of us ever found out. For a while, I wondered if the pony was dead, if my parents knew he was dead and kept this a secret from me, but we weren’t that kind of family. I had to explain about my dawn walk, of course. For once I had an appetite for breakfast. Daddy listened with interest about the lit-up hand and then said, “Miss Genevieve, how come you get to school so doggone early?” “It’s my habit,” Miss Genevieve said. Mama said to me, “I’m glad I didn’t know you were out running around. I thought you were still asleep in your bed.” Years later, I dreamed of the pony. My mouth was full of pebbles and the pony spoke to...