Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  Aw, how sweet, someone said as they calmly passed us, look how she’s embracing him.

  Odin then put his whole head in the water, shaking it furiously. I felt myself falling. Suddenly he stopped and righted himself up. He nudged my left leg, rubbing his muzzle against me slowly, as if in apology. Or rather, as if to appease me, aware of his charms. I patted his head gently, and pulled him to the right and whispered: Let’s go. He then broke into a quick trot. My feet were still not in the stirrups, and I held him closely as we raced up the incline and came to level ground. I pulled him to stop. He stopped. I struggled to find my balance and secure my position in the saddle. A guide came over and scolded: Odin! Not today!

  In response to this rebuke, Odin and I glided past everyone, all the other riders, and then the head guide. We’d already been warned to not let our horses do this, that such an action is a challenge to authority. I pulled him to stop. I felt the collective judging eyes of the other riders. Including Brian’s. I felt embarrassed and helpless. I could not control my horse. I leaned down to warn him, grumbling in his ear: Cut it out. Or I’m going to switch horses with someone.

  I suspected that Odin understood my frustration perfectly.

  I also suspected he knew switching horses was impossible at this point.

  So we repeated this several times: he’d keep trying to pass everyone, and each time he did it, I pulled him to stop. Eventually, I stopped talking to him. I sat there, stoically on top of him. Each time, when he’d then nudge my left leg, I didn’t react.

  It takes trees a long time to grow here, a guide said, sidling up next to me. Because of the climate. Same with training these horses. They are tough, but have minds of their own.

  After an hour of this stopping and starting, Odin seemingly tried to make amends. There were about forty riders total, with four guides, but no matter where we were on the trail, Odin would bring me back continuously to Brian’s horse, so we could ride together. At one point, the same guide pulled up alongside us, and said: He’s smart. He knows this man is your mate. Then he added: He’s being good. Don’t expect it to last too long.

  But still, this is the horse for me, right? I sighed.

  Do you want to change horses? Brian called out to us.

  My guide shook his head at both of us.

  You have to trust him, miss, he said.

  Do you trust him? I asked him.

  I don’t know, the guide said. I’ve actually never ridden him. He’s very difficult, and usually a curmudgeon.

  Odin then took the opportunity to surge off again, but this time I pulled him back quickly, continuously pulling and falling against him, until he stopped.

  See? the guide said, pulling up beside me.

  See what? Brian called over, catching up to us again, sounding more frustrated than I was.

  When we dismounted for lunch, Odin went to eat grass with the other horses. Since we weren’t allowed to take photos on horseback—for good reason, our safety—as frustrated as I was, I wanted to get a quick photo with my horse, to remember our first day together. Brian and I had talked about living in the moment—taking a break from our phones, computers, and social media—but I couldn’t help it. I asked him to hold on to Odin’s reins while I took a photo of him from afar. Odin responded by trotting over toward me, dragging Brian along with him, and nuzzling my phone.

  I then made the mistake of taking a running head start to attempt to get this photo.

  Because Odin runs faster than I do. Much, much faster. Brian was nearly sailing through the air.

  I realized Odin was not going to cooperate. He snorted loudly, and nuzzled the phone in my hand, as Brian handed me the reins. Odin was fascinated with the phone as I flipped the camera our way to take a selfie. I couldn’t get his whole head in the photo. Odin leaned in very close, so close, if I turned my head, I would have gotten a mouth full of his hair.

  This horse posed for a picture.

  But also, once again he got his way, and we took the kind of photo he wanted.

  Afterward, Odin settled down on the ground. He was, for a moment, very serene.

  The guide said: You can sit next to him. Odin likes you. He likes your company.

  Brian was more cautious and said: We aren’t close to anywhere.

  We aren’t close to anywhere? I said. What do you mean?

  What if he kicks you by accident, or gets on top of you—

  What?

  I MEAN if he ROLLS on top of you—

  I looked at Brian. He was looking at Odin, frowning. I thought I must be imagining things, but it did seem that he was a bit, well, jealous. But he also wore a familiar worried expression, one that I’d seen before, one that asked what would I do if I lost my balance or all the feeling on my left side. What would I do—or rather, what would we do—if that pain found me in a remote place on a remote island, far from my neurologist and our families—our sense of home and security.

  And yet, this was exactly what I needed: to stop being so cautious.

  To give in, not foolishly, but for something, someone, who was important to me.

  Even if, at that time, that someone was a horse I’d known for less than a day. Or maybe because he’d known me for less than a day, but could sense things about my nature in a very real, nonhuman way. Maybe because Odin didn’t seem too worried that I’d hurt myself. Maybe because he was, in the words of the guide, not gentle and had a mind of his own. After all, he first nudged me, and I had to be up for the challenge of dealing with a very willful horse that also expressed a tenderness toward me. I knew that he wouldn’t, in the end, hurt me.

  All I could say to Brian was that I’d be careful. I tried to be, anyway. I lowered myself gently to the ground, and patted Odin’s head and then his neck. He closed his eyes. I lay against him, gently, and then more assuredly. I heard him breathing. It sounded like a great hall filling with oxygen, with a world, with whatever is the opposite of emptiness.

  For a moment I was in the suspension of a horse’s breath.

  Somewhere, the restless ghost quieted her anxious desire to make herself known, that parts of my old self were still here.

  Somewhere, she wrestled herself into an idea of just becoming by being.

  A caballo regalado, no se le ven los dientes.

  Be grateful for your time together.

  Odin and I were silent as can be.

  We were, just for a moment, the two of us, and indeed, not close to anything, or anywhere, but each other.

  At that moment, I placed my trust in that.

  I still do.

  That first day, in late afternoon, we crossed a river on the way to our destination for that evening, a homestead where we’d spend the night. Odin and I had fallen behind again, and were the last ones to cross. It began to sleet and rain at the same time. I remember when we first entered the river I studied the horses who’d just crossed, their hindquarters soaked and shaking off torrents of cold water. Odin took me nearly straight down a slope, the feeling of falling returning as I straightened my spine and held on to him with my legs. We entered the river, and when we reached halfway, he stopped.

  I spoke to him gently, pulled at the reins, tried to push him onward with the forward motion of my body. But he didn’t move.

  Across the river, the group had already gone on toward camp, and only Brian and the guide remained, waiting for me on the other side of the bank. I saw Brian turn around and look at us. I realized I was sitting on a very still horse in the middle of a fast-moving river, with water up to my waist.

  I felt panic rising up in my chest.

  Though Icelandic horses can swim quite well, and can survive treading the cold, glacial waters, what if the horse suddenly bucked, my foot got caught in the stirrup and my head was submerged until I drowned? What if I got hypothermia? Or what if this were some strange test of nature, some cruel twist to the idea of “trust,” one animal (him) testing another (me) to see just how far the other would go before giving into fear and surre
ndering, my dignity waving some inner white flag?

  The guide called out to Odin, and then called to me, and then to both us in one quick breath, almost as if our names had become entangled, a new kind of expletive—Rosebodin!

  Odin remained unfazed.

  I felt him breathing calmly, his body contracting and expanding between my legs.

  Like he was waiting.

  Waiting for me to see just where we were: beyond the misty sleet falling around us, beyond the middle of a freezing river. Beyond the body, that which I felt I could not control. My body in which I’d lost faith and trust, as I sat so still upon another so certain, so solid and powerful, that which had been simultaneously challenging and protecting me. A rowdy, graceless, and rather rude horse that, in the end, chose me, perhaps because he sensed how broken and fearful I’d become not only of my body, but of life itself.

  It was in that moment, as the guide began to turn his horse around to reenter the river, that I became fully present.

  Something kicked inside me, that old instinct to think fast on my feet, that which got me through scrambling boulders on my own and walking home late at night in East Jerusalem by myself on badly lit roads, where no railing protected me from sharp and sudden cliffs.

  Only now I wasn’t completely alone.

  But Odin wasn’t here to protect me; he was here to encourage me. Although he knew the way, although he could brave these waters for much longer than I ever could, he was waiting for me to stop being afraid, to lead us both out of the river.

  Looking back, as Brian once told me, it all happened very quickly, so quickly that by the time Odin and I reached the side of the other bank, the guide had not yet even entered the water. But at that time, it seemed like a lifetime of cold water seeping through my clothes, until the chill reached the ghost, my ghost. Something kicked inside me; it was the old me. The first me. I turned myself over to Odin as he turned himself over to me. I pulled the reins to the right, and kicked him gently to move. My entire lower body was in the river. I could do this. I leaned into him, and then lifted myself up. The water was moving fast but we were faster. We were reactive. We were volatile.

  What I have been is not yet lost.

  I often wonder what will happen not only to myself in the future, but also to humankind. And I have come to believe if we all disappear, I will not mourn this world. Because I am quite certain these horses—horses that thrive in the uninhabitable—will inherit these continents that someday will be pushed together. Because I am quite certain that Odin knows his thousand-year history, in a way that does not require words.

  I would not weep if the future means no speech like our speech, no language, no poetry as we have defined it. For there is a poetry beyond us, beyond humans. If in future eras no one knows what it means to “read” and our books go unread, turn to dust, to earth, while the über-horse lives on, breaking our laws, disregarding our borders, and running alongside any horse of their choosing, I would not think this world lost.

  Perhaps we have to overcome what makes us human to understand the rest of the world around us. Perhaps part of that is letting go of what we think is best for all living things. Perhaps part of that is forgetting language, forgetting the self as what language alone makes. Yet in order to convey these experiences and ideas what else can I use?

  I wish I could send every poet and writer a horse for their dreams, for when I returned home from the trip and was reading The Sagas of Icelanders, I came across the name of the horse I’d been given—Odin. I learned he was named after the patron god of poets.

  When Odin and I came out of the river, we soon joined our group dismounting at the homestead. My horse shook the water off his body and grazed while Brian and I showered in hot water heated by geothermal power. Then, having changed clothes, Brian and I sat bundled up in a field looking at the stars, waiting for our guide who’d take us to “chase” the Northern Lights.

  Before we turned in for the night, I said good night to Odin, and that I’d see him in the morning. I laid my head against his still-damp coat. I could hear him breathing. I still do. I will always remember that deep chamber of being, the rising and falling of him. I left part of myself there, within him, in that soft, baked earth of an eye, his wet terra-cotta eye, that weary eye, if weary were the sum total of his world. Trust me, says the eye. Trust.

  If we could entrust this planet to only one kind, I’d stake my life on the horses.

  May they inherit the earth.

  Contributors

  C. MORGAN BABST is a native of New Orleans. She studied writing at Yale and NYU, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Washington Post, Saveur, the Oxford American, Guernica, Garden and Gun, and the Harvard Review, among others. Her debut novel, The Floating World, was named one of the best books of 2017 by Kirkus, Amazon, Southern Living, and the Dallas Morning News and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

  Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, ROSEBUD BEN-ONI is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (Alice James Books, 2021) and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). Her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears in Black Warrior Review (2020), is part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets, which she began in 2019 in honor of the periodic table’s 150th birthday. She is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her work appears in POETRY, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), the Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. In 2017, her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by the Kenyon Review Online. Her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was recently featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. She’s part of the 2018 QUEENSBOUND project, founded by KC Trommer, and took part in the Onassis Foundation’s 2020 ENTER exhibition. She writes weekly for the Kenyon Review blog.

  BRAUDIE BLAIS-BILLIE is a Brooklyn-based writer hailing from the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Hollywood reservation. Focusing on the intersection of Indigenous issues, music, and culture, her work has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, i-D, Glamour, Billboard, and more. Braudie is the founder and editor of indige•zine, a digital and print platform for Indigenous art, identity, and resistance.

  ADRIENNE CELT is the author of three novels, including End of the World House, which is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster; Invitation to a Bonfire, which was named a 2018 Indie Next Pick and a best book of the year by the Financial Times; and The Daughters, which won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 Crawford Award. A collection of her comics, Apocalypse How? An Existential Bestiary, was published by New Michigan Press in 2016. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and a Glenna Luschei Prize, and residencies at Jentel, Ragdale, Lighthouse Works, and the Willapa Bay AiR, among other honors. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Zyzzyva, Epoch, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review Daily, and many other places. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

  SARAH ENELOW-SNYDER is a freelance writer who grew up in Spicewood, Texas, and has lived in the New York area for the last fifteen years. She has bylines in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, High Country News, theGrio, and many others.

  NUR NASREEN IBRAHIM is a writer, journalist, and producer. Her fiction and nonfiction have been included in anthologies and collections from Catapult, Hachette India, Platypus Press, The Aleph Review, Salmagundi magazine, and more. She is a two-time finalist of the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction.

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lamb
da Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

  T KIRA MAHEALANI MADDEN is a writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Bloomsbury).

  ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE, the Prix des libraires du Québec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD, an award for one book of any genre in the world. It has been translated into ten languages. Their next book, Both and Neither, is a genre-and-gender-bending work of memoir, history, cultural analysis, trans reimaginings, and international road trip about life beyond the binary. It is forthcoming from Doubleday. An essay adapted from the book appears in Best American Essays 2020.

  COURTNEY MAUM is the author of the novels Costalegre, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, and Touch; the popular guidebook Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book; and the forthcoming memoir The Year of the Horses. Courtney’s nonfiction has been widely published in such outlets as the New York Times and Modern Loss, and her short story “This Is Not Your Fault” was turned into an Audible Original at Amazon. Courtney is the founder of the collaborative retreat program The Cabins, and she has a creativity advice newsletter you can sign up for at CourtneyMaum.com.