What if all you trusted was to crumble about you?
When a new pony arrives at Valley Riding School, volunteer Abby has no idea of the integral role that he has to play in the unfolding of her life. She goes from riding once per week to preparing for...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
My heart skips a beat, my blood stands still in my veins. Matt's stomach contracts in a painful breath. Not physical pain, I don't think, but mental. I can tell by the way his eyes reach upwards as if searching for something.
Resolution? Redemption? Something omni-present yet intangible, there but not.
I don't move my fingers, I feel the way that the scar rises at the edges and plummets in the middle- mars the smooth skin that surrounds it like a bomb crater or the Grand Canyon. It is horrific and magnificent all at once, and I find myself wanting to scream and cry and fight all together. He keeps his hand on mine, fingers resting lightly on my knuckles, and his eyes drop to meet me. Paralysing.
"She did this?" I don't want to say the name, it is stuck on my tongue, harsh and rough. The word is unnatural and wrong in a way which it wasn't even a few minutes before. Nausea surges within me at the thought. My voice is quiet and low.
I take my hand away when Matt moves his, and place it awkwardly on Spring's neck, latching my frozen fingers that don't quite feel like mine onto her short and neatly pulled mane . She stays still and quiet, providing the solid barrier that I need so desperately.
The night rises like a cloak thrown over the head, sudden and blinding. It is silken, lying limp over the hills and the trees on the horizon, and the stars have found a place to hide* somewhere within the swathes and folds of the cloth.
It was raining. Matt says, voice empty of all emotion. It is like he isn't speaking at all, and the crescent moon speaks on his behalf. The night was quiet apart from the pattering on the roof, he says, but it was the quiet that hurt the most. She used to sit at the kitchen table on those nights, a glass of something in her hand. I never knew what- perhaps whiskey, or some other liquor. There was a box, which she kept in the drawer with the knives. She never let me see inside.
She'd cry over that box, when I watched from the stairs through the open kitchen door. There were papers and photographs, letters too, I think. The tears were never sad, as such, maybe angry was a better description of them.
Tears of ice.
Sometimes she would scream, an unearthly, devilish roar of anguish. That was what it seemed to me, anyway, and it scared me. I wondered what the box held. I think now that it was memories of my father. She would have had angry tears about him- I had them- have them- about her.
He pauses, breath hitching as though inflicted with physical pain. I don't say anything, hoping to offer sympathy in my silence, or in the way that I listen with undivided attention. He continues, The phone rang, that night. It wasn't late, but it was winter and it was dark, and Kerys had never dealt well with interruptions on these nights.
I cowered behind the stair banister. My bed would have been a safer place to be, but I had lived a mere decade and was curious. I wanted to know why my mother cried. She let the phone ring for a moment, tactless notes piercing the air like shards of broken glass. It was thick, the air, like it couldn't be cut through by a thousand sharpened blades. She answered the phone, her footsteps falling with a resounding thud on the wooden floor at each step.
My ears were sharp, and I could hear Sara on the end of the line. She said that she'd had letters, complaints, horses that were scared to jump. I knew what was happening because I had seen it myself. She used to wait at the wing of a jump, pole in the palm of her hand. She used to wait. The horses used to jump and she used to pull the pole upward until it hit the horse's legs with a smack.
They used to jump higher after that.
Sara knew she did it too- she had figured it out from the barrage of complaints from angry customers.
It was Sara's right to be angry, but she never raised her voice, was never rude or malevolent. She let my mother go gently, prising her from the farm with gentle words and a tone of silk.
Then the threat, 'I will report you'.
I crept a little towards my mother, hoping to catch a few more phrases, wandering what would happen to me. I thought of Autumn. I wondered if he would miss me when I was gone. My mother threw the phone down with unnatural force, took a swig of her drink and hurled the glass to the floor.
Then she screamed again.
I couldn't move, couldn't turn my eyes from her raging face. She didn't see me.
The anger was short lived, I thought, and soon condensed into tears once more. She threw the box, and the contents scattered over the glass strewn floor.
I was supposed to be asleep.
She went to the kitchen, then returned with a dustpan and brush, sweeping the glass together. I watched: then, of their own accord, my legs began to move. She was upset, and she was my mother, so I wanted to comfort her. Her eyes snapped up as I rounded the banister, soulless in the way that the blue was too pale to be considered real.
An avenging angel.
There was a shard of glass in her hand- a big one which she had taken from the floor to put in the dustpan, but she was frozen in place as we watched each other, unmoving.
"Are you ok?" I asked. I stepped forwards and offered her a hug, "It's scary when you scream."
I don't know what I did. Maybe it was the wrong time, maybe I was in the way. Sometimes I tell myself she didn't mean to do it. She loved me, she said. I believed her.
But in that instant, all I knew was that a shard of glass pressed painfully into my abdomen, and as she pulled it across, my blood was the richest shade of crimson.
---
* A lyric from the Arctic Monkey's song, Black Treacle (just so I know I'm not stealing it XD)
Hi, I'm really happy with this chapter now after re-reading it and editing it every day since Monday so hopefully you like it! tell me why/why not in the comments (criticism is always helpful).
I am aware that Matt didn't have speech-marks in this chapter. I did it for effect but do you think it worked? I can change it back if it caused confusion?
What do you think of Matt's reaction to Kerys' anger? Understandable for a ten year old?
Was this too heavy on description? I was putting lots of effort into atmosphere and thought maybe I'd done too much?
Anyway, thank you for reading and please vote if you enjoyed :)
