WILD HORSE
a novelette
KYLE RICHARDSON
Meerkat Press
Atlanta
WILD HORSE. Copyright © 2019 by Kyle Richardson.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at [email protected].
ISBN-13 978-1-946154-41-5 (eBook)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Tricia Reeks
Published in the United States of America by
Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia
www.meerkatpress.com
For Michelle,
who always reminds me that everything's better with love in it.
GRADY FINDS IT IN THE SPRING, when the leaves are sprouting from the trees in tiny pink-green buds. There are no trees in the courtyard, there’s only dirt and rocks and other kids that look like Grady—their heads shaven, their clothes loose and gray, the skin under their eyes a creamy blue and red. But Grady has found a crack in the wall, a crack that wasn’t there before—a crack that isn’t supposed to be. Whenever the guards aren’t looking, he leans his face against the wall and peers through the crack at the world outside. He does this with his left eye first. Always his left eye first. The gap is so tiny it’s like squinting through a nostril. But in that nostril there’s the sky, purple as a bruise, and beneath it there are scrawny trees with tiny pink-green buds. Today the trees bend and sway, like they know Grady’s watching. Like they’re dancing just for him. And his cracked lips spread until he’s smiling, big and dumb.
This is when he hears the voice. “What’re you looking at?” The voice comes from behind him, small and smooth and wild, like the picture of the horse taped to the ceiling above his cot. It knocks something loose in him, something that tumbles free, something that falls but doesn’t seem to ever land. Whatever it is, it just keeps on falling, lost somewhere inside him. Grady frowns and squirms, but the stupid feeling doesn’t quit. “Go away,” he tells the voice. He doesn’t bother to turn. “I’m looking at spring,” he adds, “but you wouldn’t know what that is.”
The voice that’s like a wild horse, it tells him, “I do too know what spring is. And I know that you’re mean and I don’t like you.” Then the voice is gone, and a guard walks by, and Grady looks away from the wall as if the crack isn’t there at all. And stomping away from him straight across the courtyard, like she’s trying to knock the world off orbit with the weight of her footsteps alone, is a skinny girl with loose gray clothes and raspberry-yellow hair.
Grady raises his eyebrows. Whatever that thing is inside him, it tumbles even faster.
***
He sees her again at lunch—the girl with the raspberry-yellow hair. The only kid out of all the kids whose head isn’t shaved. She’s sitting cross-legged on her desk with a tray of food on her lap. The bits of food that she doesn’t seem to like, she flicks onto the floor. None of the other kids go near her. They give her a wide berth, like moons orbiting a planet. Like spaceships avoiding the gravity of an imploded star. Grady knows everything about stars and planets and moons. He read all about them, back when the world still had books.
These other kids, they sit the way they’re supposed to sit: with straight backs on their metal chairs, their food trays centered perfectly on their vinegar-wiped desks. In this giant room, under the bright florescent lights, there’s order and shaved heads and parallel angles everywhere.
Everywhere except where the girl is sitting.
Grady clenches his jaw until the muscles bulge beneath his ears. He has to clench his jaw in times like these. Has to. When something just doesn’t make sense, he’s got to ground himself, to pin himself against something solid and secure. Something real and permanent. And what could be more real and permanent than his very own teeth? So he bites down, molars against molars, and he walks through the radius of empty space, past the perfectly aligned chairs with the straight-backed kids in them, until he reaches the girl. And while she sits slumped and cross-legged on her food-speckled desk, her raspberry-yellow hair spilled over her eyes, he says to her, “How come you look different than the rest of us?”
The girl glances up at him in slow motion, up through the curtain of her hair. Her green eyes widen, just a pinch. Then she narrows them. “Oh,” she says. “It’s you.” She jerks her chin up, swishing her bangs away from her eyes. “Here to rub it in?” Her lips twist and mash together, like pink worms wrestling for space. “So what if you get to see spring?” she says. “I don’t even care.”
And Grady hears it: the sound behind her words. Not her voice, exactly, but something in it. Something that sounds like pain and hurt and loneliness, like a girl who’s been sitting in an empty circle for years. And maybe it’s not possible, maybe it’s silly to even think it, but if it he could, he’d erase that sound. He’d wipe it clean the way the guards wipe food stains off the desks. She’d sound so much prettier without it. So he says, “Do you want to see spring, too?” He grinds his teeth together and adds: “I’ll show it to you, if you want.”
The girl with the wild-horse voice, she brushes a lock of raspberry-yellow hair behind her right ear. She locks her big green eyes on his. She wrinkles her eyebrows for an instant, but then that goes away. Then in slow motion, as slow as when she first looked up at him, she relaxes her pink-worm lips into a smile.
***
At the wall, where the crack is, when the guards all have their backs turned, Grady tells the girl, “You have to look with your left eye first.”
The girl brushes her hair behind her right ear and frowns. “Why my left eye?”
Grady scrunches his face. He hasn’t really thought about why. It just makes the most sense, that’s all. He’s tried it with his right eye first, but it always feels wrong that way, out of order, like that’s not how it’s supposed to be. But no way can he say all of that. She’d think he’s downright weird. So he tells her, “I don’t know.” Then he asks her, “Why do you always push your hair behind your right ear?”
The girl brings her hand to her right ear and pauses. Then she lowers her hand. She eyes her fingers, then brings her hand to the left side of her head. She brushes her hair behind that ear and sits there for a moment, like she’s waiting for something to happen. Then she smiles, one side of her mouth pulling higher than the other. “I get it,” she says. “It feels different.” She looks Grady in the eyes, her pupils swelling inside her bright green irises. “You’re smart.”
Grady’s face blazes, like he’s leaned too close to a fire. He looks down at his bare feet—down at the dirt and rocks and the brown-gray earth between his toes—and when he looks up the girl has her face pressed against the wall, her left eye lined up with the crack. “Oh,” she says. “So that’s spring, huh?” Her voice is muffled by the wall, her lips smashed against the concrete. But there’s an airy quality to her words, loose and free, like she’s no longer a girl sitting in an empty circle. Like she’s a wild horse, running free. “Gosh,” she says. “It’s beautiful. It’s like the trees are dancing.”
***
At night, when he’s in his cot and the guards have bolted his door shut, Grady locks his hands behind his head and stares up. Above him there’s a picture of a horse taped to the
ceiling. It’s dark in his room, like it always is, but tonight there’s a moon out. The light pours in through the steel-barred window like spilled milk. It slides along the concrete roof, filling the divots and cracks. It touches the horse picture, too, but only in certain spots, so all that’s visible is a mane here, a knee joint there, a flash of rectangular teeth. The rest of the picture is dark as ink.
This picture is, and always has been, for Grady, and Grady alone. He cut it out of a magazine once—back when they still had magazines. Back when they still had scissors. But now there are no magazines, no scissors, no horses. Now this is just his horse, sprinting through the end of time, forever and always, the last picture from the last magazine of the last horse in the world. But the girl with raspberry-yellow hair—maybe she’ll like it, too. So he wobbles on his cot, gets his feet under him, and reaches until his wiry fingers touch the picture. Then he yanks it free and stuffs it into his pocket.
***
The guards have to use a drill just to break through Grady’s skin. That’s how tough it is. Then they have to keep the drill spinning, because Grady’s body tends to heal quicker than it should. This is the only way they can figure out how to slurp his blood.
Today, they take three vials from him while he slumps on an old rubber chair. His blood bubbles inside the vials, frothy and maroon. When they start to fill a fourth vial, they lean in close and tell him things, like: “Your blood could change the world, you know” and “Do you like your lollipop?”
The drill bites into Grady’s bicep, bites and digs and whines, and the hurt is like a meteor streaking through his skin. To be fair, he’s never seen a meteor, let alone had one touch him. But it probably feels the same. Everything dangerous in space, that’s what the drill must feel like. He grits his teeth together, molars against molars. On the lollipop, his saliva dries in fat snail streaks.
The guards don’t have faces. Instead they have triangular helmets with dark, shiny visors. The visors all curve upward, like big, glossy smiles. This is reassuring. Anyone with a smile that big has to be nice. But the guards carry weapons, too—long plastic guns that dangle off their shoulders, guns that swing and swoop whenever the guards move—so maybe they aren’t really nice after all. Maybe it’s all just an act.
When the fourth vial’s full, the faceless, smiling guards pull the drill away, still spinning. They bandage Grady’s arm with sticky yellow tape, even though the hole in his skin has already healed. Then one of the guards points to the door and tells Grady, “Now get lost.”
***
After lunch, Grady finds the girl sitting by the crack in the wall. The other kids totter around with yellow bandages on their arms, too. They kick at the dirt and rub their shaved heads, their faces twisted and scrunched. In the gravelly courtyard, there isn’t much to do. But the girl with the raspberry-yellow hair, she looks pleased. Happy, even. When Grady sits on the dirt next to her, she sticks out both her thumbs. “I’m Cassie,” she says. “We didn’t trade names yet.”
Grady squints at Cassie’s thumbs, at the crescents of red-brown dirt under her nails. Her thumbs are tiny—tinier than his—and pinker all around. They are nice thumbs. “Mine are kind of shriveled,” he says, wiggling his own thumbs. “Not like yours.”
Cassie laughs, musically, her wild-horse voice bucking up and down. “You’re supposed to shake them,” she says. Her bright green gaze locks onto his, the skin around her eyes flexing. “Didn’t anybody teach you how to shake thumbs?”
Grady shakes his head. He’s only been taught one thing he can remember: listen to the guards. The guards know best. The guards are here to protect you. But he can’t remember who taught him this, or if he was even taught it at all. Maybe he figured it out all by himself.
“Well,” Cassie says, “you do it like this.” She jams her too-pink thumbs into his hands and says, “Now shake.”
Grady does as he’s told. And as he shakes Cassie’s thumbs, he eyes the tiny freckles on her nose until something blooms inside him, something weird and strange and scary and wonderful all at once, like pink-green buds and dancing trees and splotchy, violet skies, until he can’t help blurting out, “My name’s Grady.”
Cassie beams her crooked smile, one side of her mouth higher than the other, her cheeks bunched like two full moons. “Hi, Grady.” She brushes a lock of raspberry-yellow hair behind her right ear and says, “Wanna know a secret?”
***
Cassie’s secret is her arm, the skin golden and dimpled and perfectly untouched. She prods at it with her too-pink thumb and says, “See? No marks.” She leans forward, touches her pink-worm lips to Grady’s ear, and whispers, “I don’t hafta give blood like everybody else.”
And maybe it’s because she’s so close—so close that her body radiates heat, so close that her raspberry-yellow hair swishes against his collarbone—maybe this is why Grady picks up the rock.
It’s a heavy rock, as far as rocks go. Heavy for rocks in the courtyard, at least. It’s sharp, too, which is a good thing. The sharper the better, really.
And while Cassie’s leaning close, so close that the vein pulsing in her neck looks like a snake trying to wriggle free, Grady drags the rock against his arm, elbow to wrist. Wrist to elbow. He pushes and scrapes and digs and shoves, and though his skin bends with the pressure, it doesn’t break. It doesn’t even scratch.
Cassie leans back and watches, her green eyes wide as two gaseous planets. When he’s done, she touches his arm and smiles, wide and crooked. “Neat.”
Neat. The word inflates in Grady like a miniature supernova.
***
At night in the courtyard, while the other kids are all inside, Grady and Cassie lie on their backs with the gravel rocks beneath them. The rocks make the ground lumpy and sharp, but Cassie doesn’t seem to mind, so Grady doesn’t either. It’s not like the rocks can hurt him anyway.
Above them are beams and pipes and a dirty metal roof. Cassie gestures and points—to a patch of rust here, a spot of paint there—and she says, “That’s Balthazar, he’s angry ’cause someone stole his pants,” and, “There’s the Great Bobina. She’s always getting her heart broke. Her heart’s been broke so many times she won an award for it.”
Grady closes his eyes and there’s Balthazar, silhouetted against the curtain of his eyelids, running around and yelling, his butt exposed for all the kids in the courtyard to see. The Great Bobina is there, too, with the faceless, smiling guards sticking yellow bandages all over her fractured heart. Grady opens his eyes and sighs. He doesn’t have any great stories like these. The only thing he has is a stupid picture of a horse. He stuffs his hand into his pocket and runs his fingers along the picture’s glossy surface, right around the spot where the horse’s neck would be. And he frowns. Maybe Cassie won’t like it, after all. Maybe she’ll just laugh at him for having it. So he keeps his hand in his pocket and fixes his gaze on the ceiling. And when Cassie points to a dented pipe and says, “There’s the Little Squeaker,” he crumples the picture of the horse into a tiny ball.
***
The next day, at breakfast, after Cassie’s done flicking all the blue-green mush off her plate, she leans close to Grady and says, “I know when things are gonna die.”
Grady knows about death, sort of. It’s what happens when the faceless, smiling guards don’t bandage you fast enough. When they pull the drill out and your arm keeps spraying like a faucet; when the blood just keeps on squirting, no matter how many yellow bandages they stick on you. It’s when you slide off the chair, cold and white as a glass of milk. Grady has seen this happen to three other kids already. But it’ll never happen to him. No way. His arm just won’t allow it.
“Yep,” Cassie says. She flicks more mush to the floor. “I know when the guards are gonna die, too. So they let me do what I want. That’s why I don’t get shots. That’s why I still got hair.” She waves her spork at Grady and says, “Even the guards wann
a know when they’re gonna bleed out.”
***
That night, after the guards have latched Grady’s cell shut, after he’s locked his fingers behind his head, while he’s staring up at the empty space where the horse picture used to be, someone knocks on the metal door. Through the tiny slot near the bottom, a hushed voice says, “Grady?”
Grady bolts up, chest to knees, and whatever that loose thing inside him is, it tumbles even faster. “Cassie?”
Cassie whispers through the slot, her words galloping and swift. “We hafta go,” she says. “I had a dream. I saw it.” She takes a shaky breath and exhales through the slot. “The guards,” she whispers, “they’re all gonna die tonight.”
***
It takes Cassie a few minutes to figure out the latch. After that they’re running, tripping, bounding through the halls, past the still-locked doors with the other kids inside. Grady tugs at Cassie’s hand while the latches and iron bars whiz by. All these cells where the other kids lie silent on their cots. “What about them?” he asks. “Shouldn’t they be told, too?” But Cassie is a whirlwind, pulling him along. And when they reach the courtyard, Grady can only gape.
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