I do remember how it is, out here. According to the clerk, there weren’t any of her belongings to collect from the car. Since I couldn’t afford the impound fees, I would not be permitted to examine the vehicle for myself—this was in keeping with a policy of which the sergeant took every opportunity to inform me, displaying an extremely toothy expression, which I believe I was supposed to index as an apologetic smile. In the end, the car went to auction, which is where and how I got it back; I enjoy an auction. Upon taking possession, I found the first page of her letter—in purple gel, in her cramped hand—folded into the top compartment of the console armrest.
She had made bookmarks of the rest of the letter, to use in those books she had arranged to have brought to her in the hospital. Of these, I remember: a yellow novel under the name Albahari; a primer on flytying, also yellow; and, Sadducismus, in facsimile of the 1682 second edition, with the appendix of Anthony Horneck. Her room was brightened by a clear clerestory, and the stink of Callery pear—which I enjoy, to be honest—suffused the air. Pale greenwhite petals of the same had blown against the panes, were plastered there by the rain.
In all this are intimations that the events described in the letter… But no. I don’t know where she is, and I present the letter here for you to make up your own mind. I have excised the salutatory page, which is intimate, and also—as it was composed antecedent to the events with which you are concerned—irrelevant; of the remaining pages, the following is as accurate a transcription as I am able to provide.
The Horse’s hand rose right up out of the ditch, and with bent fingers besought, I think, my attention. You know the ditch in question, that watercourse along the western wither—if shoulders are withers—of Gifford Road. The ditch that parches in drought to a gulch of haygrasses, and wherein the water rises in winter, if it is wet. You’ve been gone, but you remember how it is, out here. Well, it was winter, and it was wet—when I met the Horse.
I hadn’t known that it was the Horse’s hand. I hadn’t known about the Horse. I mean, there are horses—and there are some, on Gifford Road—and then there are horses. And then there is the Horse. I often drove my car down Gifford Road, and I had known about the horses. Black, bay, dapple gray, fewspot, frame, roan, dun… I was interested in horses, and you knew that. You might have told me.
That afternoon, I pulled onto the shoulder—which was a wither—as off of Gifford as I could get without getting into the ditch. I was flashing hazard lights, just as I should have done: I wanted to take pictures of the hand—which I understood just as a hand of wood—and I didn’t want to get hit. Rain fell down, or else it came up from the ground. The wind rose with mist. It rose with smoke from waste burns, and with white survey flags fluttering in it. Beyond the ditch, on a mast thrust forth from the sodden lawnscape, a broad flag fluttered. Barry of white and of black rifles—or the field white, and charged therewith. Blazon’s new fusils, I suppose. You remember how it is, out here.
Anyway, I was kneeling by the side of the ditch, adjusting the autofocus and exposure, when a cyclist slowed up alongside. And seeing my hazards, I suppose, cried through the rain—
Are you alright.
Which I was, and I waved the rider on. I heard the freewheel whirr, and the wheels sluice what waters had overflown the road. Had I looked up, I’d have seen the rider disappear on a downslope, suspended inches over the saddle, in the air. I didn’t look up. I did see how the hand rose, the crown on a cubit arm of warped wood. I saw how the thumb was splayedback, such that, but for the four fingers extended, it would have hitched a ride. I hitched up my skirt, and I would have stepped down into the ditch—only a man pulled up behind.
The man cut his engine. He came around his car with a fourway wheelbrace, which he was spinning in his hand, and—coming through the rain—he cried nothing. I watched his iron cross and recross the air, closing the distance between us. It whistled—it made a high whistling sound. Perhaps, I thought, from its pipes unstopped at the center. The man came closer, and the whistling rose in pitch; the risen wind rose still. Closer, and closer, until between us the Horse’s hand rose—
And then every mailbox had a whirling redarm, or on rusteaten augers gyred the earth. Then brightpink pennant flags and pinwheels, windmills and weathercocks all spun in my eyes. There was whistling in my ears, in my inside. There was whistling in the iron that crossed my eyes. Was the man whistling. From the churning swill of the ditch, the Horse rose between us, high as a hill.
Now, the orange windsock swells with gusts, and rotor shadows till the floodlit landing ground. The helicopter blows the stalks and stems back, mows the green grass down.
The hand was the Horse’s hand, but the man didn’t know it. He didn’t understand. The Horse stood over him, by several heads, and it righted itself so fluidly. The Horse sprung up from the runoff water as a horse might from fields of fescue and clover, with clear dewdrops clinging to its mouth. I saw that, from the ditch, the drops that clung to the Horse’s mouth were dark and gluey. I saw the same glewdrops speckle the man, his hair dripping dark ditchwater. He looked surprised.
Among the glewdrops, the Horse had a wide mouth—a wide wooden mouth, and a wooden hand. It was a wooden horse, as I suppose you know. The wooden Horse had hooves on three legs. On the fourth, it had the hand, where a hoof might have been—the right forelimb. It cabossed the man.
I mean: the Horse peeled off his head, and ate it—no different than a fleshen horse will eat an apple. The Horse just thrust out its horseteeth, brought them about his head, then buckedforth, and bit down.
Now you owe me, said the Horse.
What are you ought, I said.
You ought to find my fourthhoof, said the Horse.
Forsooth, I said.
My right front forehoof, said the Horse.
I thought about it. I didn’t know why I should owe the Horse. I didn’t know where to find the Hourse’s hoof. Also, I appreciated the Horse’s hand. I had wanted to take pictures of the hand, when it was just a hand of wood. Understanding that it was the Horse’s hand, I reckoned that I still would.
On the other hand, the Horse had just eaten a head.
Or else, I said.
Or else, said the Horse, Or else, I’ll trample you—I’ll choke you with my hand.
What could I do. I felt that I ought to find the fourthhoof.
The Horse took me at a trot down Gifford Road. We went past castiron Clydesdales and plastic ponies, all in an ashen color, and with white feathers on their hooves. We went past plastic deer, and through clouds of bluesmoke and cinders. We went further down the road, whither night fell, and the rain didn’t. From a rise in the road, I could see that the fields were all alight—as they are in Easter, or with Adventen fires. I could see the moon, which was convex and increscent, and all in a baleful cheesewhite.
Waxing gibbous, said the Horse, with a snort.
Oh, right, I said.
The moon threw its light on the wooden Horse, and it was plain, in the moonlight, that the Horse had no mane. On either side of its baldhead, the Horse’s eyes were shot through with fine brown veins. These were the grain, the annular rings around the dark heartwood—or, planed the other way, were pales in the plank with a knot within it, which were the dark lake of the iris, and the pupil, the pith. I looked the Horse in the browning eye beside me.
Why me, I said.
You are the groom, said the Horse.
What, I said.
The man knew you were the groom—don’t try to deny it.
How would you know, I said. The Horse whinnied, and shied a bit.
I ate the man’s head, the Horse said. When I ate the man’s head, I thought all his thoughts. He thought you were the groom.
Do you mean a groomer, I said.
He thought it was disgusting, continued the Horse, flipping the hair it didn’t have. I think I whinnied, then.
I guess it’s a good thing you came along, I said. I guess he was going to hurt me.
He wasn’t going to hurt you, said the Horse. He was going to help you change your tire.
What, I said.
While we had been talking, we had crossed the Telegraph Road, the tributary, and the turnpike. When we arrived at the Vermilion Road convergence, the Horse led me off the way, and through a stand of staghorn sumac. The lower limbs had been cutback, and the coppiced tops shot forth many fawn and furred silver antlers, many guley anthers. The Horse was tall, and its head brought down some of the fruit—desiccated bloodblack drupes—in a shower upon us. I caught some on my tongue; so long out of their season, they were insipid.
In the eastern sky arose a red and white guyed lattice mast, and a cloud of starlings—or they seemed so—wheeled in and out of the network of it. Now the little black kite of a bird might alight a moment upon a monopole, or a clay eggshape insulator. The night is not for starlings, as you know, and at length I heard their cry, and knew.
Poorwills, I murmured.
Poor you, said the Horse. Time to go down to the bottom.
The Horse had its hand upon my shoulder, and with my hair down between its withered wooden fingers, the Horse played, I would say, on my reins. After the sumac, it led me down lanes of moonlight, through yearling rows of fragrant fraser or concolor fir—I was not sure, they were washed so white. At length, I saw beyond, to a cattle pond. The moonlight pooled thereon, argent over all, and with the flamebright tongues of fog coming up, sort of ardent. Is that the bottom, I thought.
At the bottom, it was bright and choking. With fronds of watershield floating about and above me, I watched the flies arc: Blue Charm, Purple Peril, Comet, Coppertop. Brightpink, and everywhere were pale perwinkle pleated fairyparasols. Fruiting in profusion, the fungi comprised a wavering carpet at the bottom of the pond. I watched the Horse’s hindlegs stamp and splash against the smoky glass—whereby I mean, the screen of water overhead—and its bald buckskin head swing side to side.
White ribbons of lightning came down through the water, which chattered my ribs, and shook me from firmament to fundament—in vessels and chambers, phlegms and phloems, in xylem, in chyles and chymes. It sounded chimes. It shook the whipcord and the wandshape, and—bloodborne or along bronchioles—the flocks of plasma, platelets, protists, plummeting birds shot from the sky of my inside. The lightning shook in the pressure of airs, in the dissipating pressors I had taken—that afternoon, I’d had a nagging cough. The lightning shook in tromps and pulser pumps, in pipes and in the stalks of common reed. In reeds and flues, in cornet flutes, in trumpets. In the oppositional propagation of sound in standing waves. Also, it shattered my teeth. Sinking strike indicators, radio washes, protogalactic snows. There were the longnose gar going round, and the pickerel. There were the gills over the ground: I picked mine.
At bottom there is a meadow within the meadow, there is a colorful door. The Horse’s hoof hangs in proscription from the frame, with the toe behind and the frog before. The fourthhoof, it swings—it swung—on a gambrel hook. I grasped it in my hand. It gives good flies and familiars, and mine answers to Egg Sucking Leech, has rosepurple plumes and black antlers. At bottom there is the green grass, the green grass and the ground, and the green grass grows…
There is a tree outside my window here, and starlings who play upon its branches. The spots of snow going from their feathertips, the birds have their springblack color coming back. The window is small, set high in the wall, and outfit with automatic shutters—occludable from my bed, although I won’t have it covered. Did I mention, I’m in transitional care—I suppose I won’t have that covered, either.
There was a tree, I should have said; today, they cut it down. I complained, and so they let me walk about at noon. The halls were perfused with pale blue light, the sun white in the curtain of solar floatglass. Among strings and specks—passing between my eye and the things I would perceive—one wriggling filament resolved to the black body of Leech. I watched as she swam—toward my sclera, I suppose—in pursuit of a round mote that passed briefly before my pupil. Then her shadow dispersed from my retinal surface, and my focus resolved. I found myself at a door which the hospital set aside for H.I.M.—or so it was marked. Ignorantly, I thought, for that Majesty is of collective provenance and perpetuation. In the end, this is the door through which I will go. I have been to the bottom, and I am assured of my place—in that peculiar collectivity—in that perpetuity.
For now, and just now, I find myself alone. I am often alone: the starlings have other trees—after today, I suppose they will keep to these—and little Leech has her own places to be. Anyway, it would be tiresome—and also, I think, nauseous—to have her always on my side. On my right—that is, my very wrong—side. Walking the phalanx of my finger, walking the white line. Walking in the pastern, and up whither on the ergot there is a spot—a little livid sclerot—of insensate tissue, whence she takes her succor. As it is, I am driven to ondansetron—I would soon commit purpresture. Commit assarts, even. No, it’s better not.
Will you come and see me here. You’ve been gone, but I’m sure you remember—how I would hold your hand.
Zebulon House is a white settler, born on unceded land of the Pennacook. They are the author of The psychic surgeon assists (Calamari Archive, Ink., 2024), and their work has previously appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, ergot., and Sleepingfish. They work as a librarian, and play horror sound effects on the radio; you can find them online at zebulon-hourse.xyz.