america
I untied the horses and let them go. Unbridled – eyes like pairs of black aces; I listened to hooves hit dust in the abandon of a gallop. The horses knew better than to run back to you, stood as you were in the black framed window with cigarette dipped between wrinkled lips, thinking about the shape of the sky with the night lain out on your narrow bed behind. I saw you from over by the water pump, that cigarette was smoking you.
The scalded red pot had been filled each night with meat that the black man brought to the house. You would ask what he had and from their wooden pens the horses watched the man hold up his wares. His eyes smouldered like the fists of your hammers, limbs heaved with the pent up fire of muscle under chains. The lick of your lips was written across more than just your face. It was in that lean, that tilt to the left in the doorway, it was violence.
You would out-drink me on a Saturday then out-God me on a Sunday; I looked to you for all of those important things. Your walnut face looked harder than mine and I wanted it - to be a man - the kind of man who looks in the mirror and sees nothing but himself. The kind of man that knows when the weather is turning in. When to turn back. I was not that. I was not you. But over time I came to feel as though the horses and the black man knew something different, something that you only told yourself.
At the quiet end, you rolled your faltering bulb of a head to the side to look at me as I sat by the bed and said, ‘The horses never liked me because I was better to them than I ever was to you.’ We had all known that there was little more than eyebrows and denim between us, but to hear you say it, lying there on that narrow bed beneath the black framed window with the horses running out onto the plain as though they had never known either of us, it could only have been true.
After you were gone I stayed beside the bed and kept watch through the black framed window.
Soon, the night swallowed the horses and you lay dead. I turned over your cooling hands so that the palms faced up. I don’t know why I did it but in some strange way it made you easier to like.
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