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By Root 321 0

seeing that I was comfortable up there, she told me how to hold the reins and she let go of the horse’s head. The big animal walked ahead slowly. I could feel every nuance of him shooting through my own body and, most remarkably, I felt like I was inside his head, like I could feel his thoughts. It was the most amazing sensation I’d ever had in my life. I stayed up there for quite a long time until finally the girl had to beg me to get down. I guess I knew right then that eventually I’d make a living with horses. I was twenty-four. I knew that it was unheard of to decide on a life of riding at such a late age, but I didn’t care. I had something. An unusual level of communication with horses. An ability to feel them.

It took me years to become an apprentice rider. I started off at the unregulated bush tracks, riding quarter horses and Arabians and anything anyone would let me ride. I got laughed at a lot. I was old. I was on the tall side. But I won races, even won them honestly in an environment where every other rider was carrying an illegal buzzer or was up to something that would never fly at a regulated track. I rode mostly on weekends and had various day jobs to pay the rent. But the only time I was truly alive was on a horse’s back. I won a lot of shitty little races and eventually I met Henry Meyer, a New York trainer who said he’d help me get an apprentice license in New York. This was the toughest circuit to break into but they said if you cut your teeth in New York you were guaranteed a career.

Soon Ava and Grace and I moved up to Queens. At first Ava hated it. Then her medication was changed and she loved it. Sometimes she’d go off her meds and disappear for days at a time. Henry Meyer’s wife, an Englishwoman named Violet, would help me by looking after Grace. Three months ago, it got to the point where I’d really had enough. Ava was sleeping around. She was drinking and taking strange drugs. Most of all, she was breaking my heart again and again.

I still loved her. But I couldn’t abide her madness anymore.

And now, I’d met someone else. Someone I could sit with in silence. Someone I could make love to repeatedly. Someone who seemed to understand.

I didn’t know what to do with any of these thoughts so I just sat there, listening to Ruby play wondering what Ava wanted from me. Knowing it was probably just her radar picking up on the fact that I was interested in someone else.

That someone else finally stopped playing piano, turned around on her bench, and looked at me.

“Hey you,” she said, as if we were greeting each other after a long absence.

I got up and walked over to her. I pulled her to her feet, held her, and found myself hoping I wouldn’t be killed anytime soon.

BEN NESTER

6.

Innocent Beasts

When my dog Dingo died, I started feeling very lowly. I’d had Dingo for ten years, since my mother’s death when I was fourteen. I loved that dog a lot and his absence made everything seem raw and worthless.

I wasn’t working much, just a few odd jobs doing carpentry but that was about it. One day, I had some work out at old Mrs. Simmons’s house on Little Egypt Road. Mrs. Simmons was a tiny brittle woman whose mind had gone soft. She often forgot to zip her slacks or button all the buttons of her blouse and her shoes seldom matched. Mrs. Simmons had dozens of chickens and apparently they were a particularly violent breed of poultry because, from what she told me, they were endlessly tearing down their coops. She’d hired me to do some patch-up work and before I was an hour into the job I had chicken shit all over me. By the end of the day, I really stank and I never wanted to see another chicken in my life. I turned down the lemonade old Mrs. Simmons offered, pocketed the forty bucks she owed me and got in my car.

I was coming around the bend on Little Egypt Road when I saw it. A beautiful fenced-in field and, off in the distance, a dozen or so horses. It’s not like I’d never seen a field of horses before. Oklahoma was full of horses. But something about this field seemed magical. I wanted to