Bright Shards of Someplace Else

Dead Horse Productions

23 dead Horse Productions As if running through a great headwind, the horse’s eyes were squinted, the lips pulled back to show the teeth, the whole head snaked forward and the ears laid flat. The impression of speed and determination in something so hulking and still was disconcerting. So was the untouched hay a few feet off, so much the possession of the horse that it seemed as if the animal might rise simply to fulfill the promise to eat it, the illusion of a dead man’s full planner. It had died in the worst spot, too, perfectly aligned with the kitchen ’s generous window. It rose up in Bill’s peripheral vision as he leafed through the phone book, first in the H’s for horse, then in the D’s for dead and dig. He looked up and met the dead horse full on for the hundredth time that day; much as he hated seeing it, half-seeing it was worse. “Hi, my name is Bill and I have a dead horse I need taken care of; could you—” “Excuse me, sir? Sorry to interrupt, but you should know Dead Horse Productions is an independent film company.” The horse was mother’s animal, and he was on his mother’s farm, a now-defunct boarding stable she had run for the last twenty years. She had been a forceful, obsessed woman, and the training of horses had consumed her life from the time she was forty on, though she always lamented those lost years before. “If only I had gotten into horses sooner—think of where I’d be now!” she’d say, though to her Dead Horse Productions 24 family her fortieth year seemed her last true appearance. Bill remembered her being an active, curious woman who could have been noted for the light and easy way she picked up and dropped passions. Iceskating , archery, poetry, music—Marie had tried them all and then let them go in a way that denoted not fickleness, but an admirable attempt to experience as much of the world as possible. Her children, largely raised in the pre-horse years, picked up this trait, and therefore none of them could understand her sudden and complete shift from a faintly amused woman resting lightly on the surface of things to a woman so inextricably joined to her passion that her house was literally grafted to her stable, with back windows that opened to the barn aisle. Despite all this, he had picked up very little about horse husbandry, and certainly nothing about what to do with their carcasses. He sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, leafing through horse-care books for any clue and glancing at the clock. He knew he could call Fran, his mother’s longtime stable hand and student, but he frankly did not want her involved. Fran had been his mother’s riding student for over a decade, and when Marie’s health began to fade and her horse boarding business was gradually dismantled, Fran had stayed on, still taking care of the barn in exchange for riding lessons and nominal pay. Fran did not believe Bill’s mother was senile, or perhaps she did not believe that senility could touch the exalted core of his mother’s horse-wisdom. For Fran, like so many previous riding students, was a loyal acolyte of his mother. Acolyte—there was no other word for it. The zealotry of the horse-world was another part of his mother’s new life that baffled him—who would have thought his cheerful, funny mother would one day have followers? His mother’s absence gave the house and adjoining barn the eerie feeling of a holy place newly fled. Everything about her house and stable was deeply ritualized—she rose at a certain hour, fed the horses the same time every day, opened the barn’s sliding doors a certain width, hung the halters so all the metal rings were lined up so one Dead Horse Productions 25 could look straight through them and see the wood of the tack room wall beneath. His mother had been unable to perform these tasks in recent months, and when Bill had moved in to both help her and assess her deterioration (he and his sisters had lived with his mother in shifts), he noticed the obsessive care Fran took in upholding...