Wild Horse
This is for @dr-aculaaa!! If you are not Drac, keep it moving. (Or you can stay and read this and also read Gutterballs. That would be preferable.)
Read Gutterballs here!
You made a mental note to check the feeder on the front porch later, lest Cecil and Maria lie around your bottlebrushes in wait. It felt silly to name them, you couldn’t even be sure it was the same birds coming around. But, in your heart, you knew it was only right. After all, they were guests here and the weather had just begun to turn. And who were you to deny a guest a drink?
Your fingers were tacky with watercolor pigment and the stretchy latex cling of foam glue. The green of your cutting mat had faded into a teal with use, and cold-pressed watercolor paper fragments stuck to the wide planes of white buffalo sprinkled across your fingers. You should take them off when you do things like this, really, you should. But you thought they looked so pretty when the pigment-tinted water splattered on them and dried.
You looked yourself in the eyes, a mirror reflection encased in talavera tile. You felt the same. The curls arranged in a fast-choreographed pile on your head looked a little more ashen every day. Gray. You forced yourself to regurgitate the word and swallow it again. You made a promise to yourself at twenty that you would not be your mother. That you would embrace it with open arms and welcome it into your home. You just didn’t expect it to arrive so soon.
Pulling yourself away from that mirror, pulling your attention back to the table in front of you. Two thousand one hundred and sixteen running legs, fastened to five hundred and twenty-nine bodies, using one thousand and fifty-eight silver pins. They ran in a stampede of color and pattern and texture. Each one meticulously painted and assembled as its own beautiful being. Each one aptly named.
“I don't know. Maybe. And I don’t know where she’s got that salvaged hunk of tin parked now, but I hope she’s still painting.”
“What did she paint?”
“Everything. Nothing. Me. Herself. Her abundance of rescued desert mutts. Stars. Clowns. Butterflies and Cactuses.”
You laughed solemnly, reaching a finger upwards to feel the raised flesh of hummingbird feather lines before you reached down to pause Gutterballs.
That salvaged hunk of tin sat, still loved and maintained at the end of the property, under her covered carport home. Once a year, during your off-season, she housed one lucky art student in residency for one week as a retreat. Retired, much like you. But did either of you ever truly work?
It was a beautiful life you lived, and you belong deeply to yourself. Bittersweet like the bite of a pimento. You wrinkled your nose thinking about it.
On the back side of the canvas, you inked in delicate writing, “Wild Horses Couldn’t Drag Me Away, 2024” Along with the swirling, sharp aperture of your signature. Though, the piece felt incomplete, merely a mass of horses with no direction.
You trimmed one last body, a swirling, wild mane and a pointed, sure head bowed in forward-facing determination. You pressed the last brass button through the legs and flank of the last horse, wanting to apologize to it for the first prick of creation, yet relished in his brilliant red hue. You placed him further than the others, pulling him forward and out of the stampede. As if he was running harder, faster, than the others.
You think you’d name him Eddie.