After Horse

By Mari Harrison

(CW: mentions of death, terminal illness, animal harm)

Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash

My sister stopped answering questions three weeks before she died. She could hear me and the hospice nurse said her cognition was fine. Questions had just become beside the point.

“Are you comfortable?” hung in the air like cigarette smoke.

“Do you want water?” got a look that said she was well past wanting.

The day before, I asked if she remembered the summer we found the dead horse in the ravine behind our house. We were seven and nine. The smell reached us first—rancid, heavy, and thick. We stood there for an hour, maybe more, hands over our noses, watching flies write scripture on its flank.

“We didn’t tell Mom,” I said.

She smiled. Her eyes looked at a point six inches to my left. The nurse said it was normal. The dying see things at angles.

“We went back every day for a week,” I said.

Her hand moved on the blanket. Her breathing changed, deep then shallow again.

By the eighth day, we didn’t need to cover our noses. The horse had collapsed into itself. Eventually, the flies thinned out. The bones showed through hide, then pushed through dirt. We stopped going when there was only a dark shape pressed into the ground where the horse used to be. There was nothing left to watch. I think we were practicing.

My sister stopped answering questions three weeks ago. She’d figured something out. I hadn’t yet.

I sit here, watching her breathe at angles. The nurse brings me water. Outside, someone is mowing a lawn. The sound rises and falls and surrounds me.

Tomorrow, there will be no horse.

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Mari Harrison loves language the way she loves coffee: obsessively and at all hours. After years crafting speculative fiction for the government and occasional poetry (as Mari Nichols-Haining), she left to chase fiction. These days she writes alongside her husband Jesse, also a writer, drawing on a mutual muse and striving to be a less chaotic version of the Fitzgeralds.

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