Friendly
Shriek of bats, in the barn’s rafters. Wild. Sweet and sour smell, our sweat, our blankets, our hay. Pebbles whickering, the clatter of her week-old foal, its brittle legs. Tired. Not-long back to sleep.
More light. Later. Rain on stables. Waiting. Droppings. Snorts, and our breath, and day-whinnies.
Restless feeling. Hack-hack of my feet against floor.
Rumble of people awake and parking cars, and skreek of tyres on gravel. Pat-pat of boots. Water cantering into buckets, in the yard.
They come in and they feed us, then. They work their way along the stables. Pebbles, and the baby, first. ‘Oh, aren’t you lovely?’
I stand, and wait, and know that I am last. I want to thrash. To run. Instead I listen. Hear the others: soft of their noses into buckets, haylage, oats. I lick salt and wait, stamp the cold out.
They come at last, the tall woman and her colt – her almost-grown boy. He pats me as I eat. ‘Hey, Friendly.’
He leaves and I eat and I wait and I listen. Larger wheels now, the sound of van. High voices, unloading, little ones whickering. Trample of boots, puddle slosh.
‘She’s good with little ones,’ the boy’s voice, ‘Would you like to meet her?’
It is always me they choose, for this. I am peaceable, comfortable for them. My teeth are bluntest, and I do not bite. And I oblige.
‘Good girl, good girl,’ the boy says to my neck, unbolting me, walking me outside. The children are agawp out there, and pointing. I piss at last, relief, and daylight, and the children giggling. And I whinny. I shimmy my head. Not too much movement, or I’ll scare the little ones. But just enough to show them I’m alive. I am.
I walk towards the steps, the boy beside me. We both know how this goes. How each child treads upwards and onto me, one at a time. Lands themselves on my back. And I walk each child in a gentle loop. The boy walks with me.
Some children cling on to me, afraid, and I go very slowly. Others are rough, kick, tug, and I flinch. But I forgive them.
A child, a girl, gives me an apple. I nibble, soft lipped, at the food on her tense, flat, hand. I want to bite. Want to gnash. I hold back. Then the children are grabbing grass, fists of it, holding it up to me. I accept. I oblige. I hold back.
The children are taken away to eat, and then they are running through the mizzling rain. The sweet of it. The boy eats, too, and feeds the other horses.
Sound of barn doors, and feet again, and grooming brushes, and I’m walked forward, and brushed by little hands. One lifts my tail up, touches me roughly with her blunt, wet hands. But she is only little, and I am forgiving. I hold my legs in tight. Don’t kick, don’t kick. Hold back.
Afterwards, he takes me back to my stable, the boy. He’s cleaned it, and he pats my neck. ‘Good girl.’
Some days there is sun. Sun for days in a row and the grass in the paddock. And we kick and hurtle, roll. All of us. Us horses. And grass and sky and hills and flies and rain and clover and cantering. And evening, and dusk, and bats, and going back inside. Holding on. And blankets on our backs. It’s a life I can stand. I can get what I need.
Phoebe Thomson (she/her) is from South London. Her stories and reviews have appeared in Best Small Fictions 2021, Litro Online, IFLA!, Brixton Review of Books, Lunate, Short Fiction and 3:AM Magazine. In 2020 she completed the Goldsmiths MA in Creative & Life Writing through the Isaac Arthur Green Scholarship.