Read Online Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle - Free Book Online

pony and run to you. Your arm, from the looks of it, is broken. Oh shit, I say. You squint up at me through a veil of blood. Doesn’t hurt .
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    Curt was the one who rescued you. He drove his pickup through the tall grass of the back pasture, lifted you onto the bench seat, made you a pillow with his shirt. And when he couldn’t get ahold of your parents, he was the one who drove you to the emergency room. I rode in the truck bed, and watched through the window as you stretched your legs across his lap, your bare feet on his thighs. I could see his arms, your face, his tanned hand as he brushed the hair, or maybe tears, from your eyes. I sat across from him at the hospital, waiting while they stitched the gash on your forehead and put your left arm in a cast, and I came in with him to check on you. I hung back in the corner when he leaned over the table, and I heard you whisper to him in a high, helpless voice. I watched your hand grope out from under the blanket, reaching towards his. And I saw him hold it. He held it with both hands. Of course I was jealous, and still am. You must still have that scar to remind you of that summer. I have nothing I can point to, nothing I can touch.
    It was early in August when the brown pony died. It happened overnight, and no one knew how: whether he colicked and twisted his gut, or had a heart attack, or caught a hind foot in his halter while tending an itch and broke his own neck. When we found the body, we didn’t cry. I remember that we weren’t even very sad. We went to find Curt, who lit a cigarette and told us not to tell the ladies. Then we went back and looked at the pony’s still body, his velvety muzzle, his open eye, his lips pulled back from his big domino teeth. We touched his side, already cold. Later we rode the pinto pony double out to the pond, your arms around my waist, your cast knocking against my hipbone. Behind us the tractor coughed as Curt pulled the pony’s body to the manure pile with heavy chains. We slipped off the pinto, letting him wander away, and sprawled out in the grass. You scratched inside your cast with a stick. Grasshoppers sprang around us. We lay there all afternoon and into the evening, your head on my stomach, our fingers in the clover, trying to think up games we could play with only one pony.
    Weeks later we were alone in the barn. We were sweeping the long center aisle, pressing push brooms towards one another from opposite ends, the radio flickering on and off, like it always did. When it faded out completely, we heard the squabbling of dogs out back. We dropped our brooms and ran to see what they’d got. Through a cloud of dust in the paddock we could make out Curt’s dog, his butt to us, bracing himself with his tail in the air and growling at one of the ladies’ fierce little dogs, who was shaking his headviolently, his eyes squeezed shut. Between them, they had the brown pony’s head. It took awhile to recognize it. It was mostly bone, yellow teeth and gaping eye sockets, except for a few bits of brown hair that hung on the forehead, some cheek muscle and stringy tendon clinging to the left side. And then we saw the little scrap of green against the white: the pony still had his halter on. This was what the dogs had got their teeth around. Curt had never bothered to take it off. With a final shake of his jaws, the little dog managed to snatch the pony’s head away, and he dragged it around the corner of the barn, Curt’s dog bounding after.
    We stood in the slanting September light and watched this. We listened to the dogs’ whines and rumblings, the scrape of the skull against the ground. Then we picked up our brooms, and when we were done sweeping we went and got the pinto pony and rode double down the hill and didn’t think much about it again. Death was familiar that summer. It was in the road, in the woods, in the holes of the foundation of the barn; it was the raccoon rotting