HOARSE
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There’s an old county road called Brickyard that runs between my parents’ house and a junction near Athens, West Virginia.
My parents always warned of its’ winds and curves as I learned to drive- it would be a forbidden landscape to me for year to come.
The summer after my freshman year of college tasted like freedom to me for 1,000 reasons, but not the least of these was my opportunity to finally race that winding course every morning on my way to Concord to take an algebra class I couldn’t place into upstate.
I was (and still am) consistently late, and as a result, I whipped down Brickyard well over the speed limit, wind whipping through my hair fighting with the cigarette smoke for space in my car, bound for hell or higher education.
About three quarters of the way between the two, there was a small wooden barn where a lonely beige horse used to greet me, sometimes near the road, waiting for the next thing to pass- others closer to the stream on the other side of the property, and still others snacking at apples left by nature or God or an owner’s caring hand.
At some point that summer, it dawned on me in a moment of mortality that there would come a time that I would drive that road and the mare would no longer be waiting.
Seasons changed and years passed, and still that earth-tone beauty signaled the halfway point, covered by a black blanket as she pranced through the snow, eating the vine plants as they blossomed, nearly out of sight on the hottest days, standing in the shallows. Like clockwork, she’d be there, more or less where I’d come to expect.
The autumn of my 26th year, I couldn’t help but feel that something had shifted, either in myself or in my surroundings, or perhaps on some greater cosmic scale. Perhaps as pedantic as it was compared to all the unexpected twists, confirmation came in the form of leaving my parents house after an early Thanksgiving, whipping down Brickyard well over the speed limit, wind whipping through my hair fighting with the cigarette smoke for space in my car bound for hell or higher wages: that beige horse was gone, along with the indecision riding shotgun when I met her.
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