Bright Shards of Someplace Else

Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge

114 Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge i A pony hangs from a sling in the middle of a barn aisle in Indiana. His front right cannon bone is broken and in a thick white cast with a slight curve for the knee. He is a silver dun with patches of white on his head and belly and streaking his mane. His name is Snippet, and he is eleven years old and thirteen hands high. His past is unknown , though for a time he was likely owned by the Amish and used as an errand-running horse for the children. At some point he was neglected , and he ended up skeletal and shaking in an auction ring in Shipshewana, Indiana. There he was purchased, for sixty dollars, by Heart’s Journey, an equine rescue nonprofit. After he was rehabbed, he became known as the Painting Pony, one of the few horses trained to lift a brush in his mouth, dip it into a bucket of paint, and press it to a large sheet of paper, again and again. Then he broke his leg. His sling hangs from the rafters at four points, suspending him inches from the aisle floor. He is hooked to an iv that enters the arched muscle of his neck. Beneath him, white sawdust covers the concrete, and a Rubbermaid box filled with antibiotics, Vetrap, bandages , Betadine, bute, etc., is stored off to his right. His water bucket, grain pan, and hay net are propped up in front of him on a wooden cart. The stall doors, off to his right and left, are decorated with getwell cards. Most of these contain his crude likeness, drawn under rainbows or among a funnel cloud of hearts and stars. A few depict him painting, leaning back and dangling the brush from a dexterous Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge 115 hoof. A tinfoil helium balloon that says “Get Well Soon” is tied around the stall bars, and a small herd of stuffed animals is tucked between them. One of Snippet’s own paintings—irregular puffs of green, blue, and pink floating over a linear red scrawl—stands on an easel in the pony’s view. It had been Marti’s idea to put the painting there. Her thought was that the painting might inspire the pony’s healing, remind him of what he needed to get back to. Marti is one-half of Heart’s Journey, the founder and ceo. She’s the emotive one, the one whose mascara is forever running down her face (why does she even wear it?) as she weeps in empathy over an equine’s pain. She’s forty-seven, with the rough look of someone with a past—drugs, spousal abuse, jail time— all this seems inherent in the cut of her Carharts, the crispy taper of her long hair, the tremulous wrinkles that seem to rotate around her mouth as she speaks in that confidential half-whisper, as if she were in hiding with whoever is listening. She seems threadbare, fragile , ready to break down or apart, yet she is so at home at the edge of ruin that she seems interred there, no closer to destruction than she is from health. She is sitting on a grain sack in the feed room. Her partner, Judy, is picking up all the medical flotsam that has washed up by the pony, as if he were the shore of a toxic sea. She kicks the dog away from a bloody wad of gauze; she rolls up the Vetrap, combines two nearly empty bottles of iodine. She picks up several syringes and fans them in her hand, as if their needles must be kept apart, then drops them all in the coffee can for sharps. Judy is fortytwo ; like a twelve-year-old girl left in the elements for thirty years, she is faded, with faint cracks for smile lines, but her childhood form is essentially unchanged, right down to the sloppy long hair and perky joint-floppiness that marks her movement. Unlike Marti, she seems fresh and healthful; she speaks with an insistent but soft voice, as if she knew her good common sense is disruptive enough and aims to dampen its inherent blows. Often she is the one pulling friends and family back from excess or irrationality; she is that steadying hand on Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge 116 your shoulder before you...