EYE OF THE HORSE
Word Count: 367
In the eye of the horse she saw herself as a thin golden princess, a waif wrapped in a butterfly wing dress with rose petal sleeves.
In the mirror she herself was a horse, long in the tooth, close-set eyes with a flurry of lashes, and an unruly mane of brownish-black hair. And rotund. Most decidedly round and rotund.
There was one single date in her first year of high school, a boy with bumps on his skin. She suspected they melted down his throat from his face, splayed out in a fan on a white hairless chest. She thought about that quite a bit until it became an idea she could find quite interesting. Fodder for dreams till the big night.
He left her at the buffet table holding two overfilled cups of pink punch. She waited what she thought was a reasonable time but sat down on the floor after an hour. She drank one cup of punch, believing it to be hers, then commenced to finish the other. She pulled herself up by the table leg, and looked around for the door. Hope hadn’t yet deserted her heart–that came quite a number of years later–and she did search for his face in the crowd of the room, though no one would meet her eye.
That was many years ago and the memory of it all still nourished her soul. She still wondered where he’d wandered off to, sad that he had not found his way back. She’d worn a lovely chocolate brown velvet dress that set off her eyes. She still has it.
So her dreams are patchworked of the past with little room left for a future. The squares are laid out like an album of photos glimpsed for that moment, caught by a camera’s eye. There are borders of present, sturdy and wide like her hips, that hold the memories together. But the fringe, the fingers of future, lay raveled and torn.
Instead of false hope, of faded dreams of what life could have been, perhaps with the bumpy boy of her youth, she looks in the eyes of the horse and believes she sees what she is.
Painful – I imagine we all have failed moments that are replayed over and over again during the course of our lives – though I must confess I’ve not yet seen myself as a thin golden princess, not even when wearing my tiara.
The instant I saw Jill’s photo of Horse, and knew the problems she said she’d be having with taking such a close shot without getting her own reflection within it really gave me that first line. From there, of course, I had to walk over to the unhappier side of life.