the very stall where her son’s life had changed years ago when he spooked
the mare, long since put down, and it kicked him, almost fatally, in the
head. He was never the same afterward, and neither were his parents.
The horse was led by Bill Sr. to the ranch’s sole pond and shot, point
blank, between the eyes. In Old Edith’s story, she took care not to spook
the horses, afraid that they’d lunge out in fear and all would be done.
She saw the alien as herself, hunched in the corner of that marked stall,
still dressed in the same cotton nightgown, now stained beige with mud
instead of its original eye-hurting white. Its head was turned into the
stall’s corner; it seemed to be sleeping.
“It took all my guts,” Old Edith whispered, solemn. “Took them
all to slit its throat.”
Sylvie, too, made sure not to spook the horses. Ever since they
were kids, Daryl and Ben scorned her for being scared of their glistening
black eyes. They understood, in their way, her fear because they felt it
themselves. But they were older, rougher. The twins kept the fear reigned
in like a bit, gnawing on it. Sylvie didn’t have that kind of grit.
Her family owned the ranch next to Brown’s, had known the
Browns for years. Daryl and Ben had played with Billy Jr. in the days
before his head busted. Together, they mucked stables and forked hay and
rode hard around the edge of the sloping land, each boy jaunting on the
backs of the families’ best fillies. Sylvie, younger and smaller, cantered at
her own slow pace. She was very young when Billy changed, was tucked
into bed that night by her mother with a kind of forced calm as Bill Sr.
cocked his gun and pulled the trigger. The cracked sound echoed in her
tiny, pink-curtained room. She remembered her mother’s face when it
happened, the tight lines at the corners of her eyes, the way she wouldn’t
answer when Sylvie asked, matter of factly, if Mr. Brown had gotten his
revenge.
She was still young when Mr. Brown’s heart stopped quick as
lightning, leaving him dead at his tractor. Edith collected his body as if
it were a matter of course. Sylvie stood, thin and pale, at the fence that
divided their property, riveted by the old woman’s impossible strength,
the way she grabbed her husband’s wrists and simply dragged him away.
Her mother placed a warm hand on her shoulder and tugged Sylvie
backward as her father, dressed in his customary Wranglers, vaulted the
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