Monday, June 11, 2012

30 Days Of Writing: Day 4

(From a random challenge of random words, from which we are to create a story, a snippet, a poem, a ramble, a vignette...anything, really.)



'Snow'

~

We found him – her – in the snow. A mare with child, struggling to birth it, heavy with pain and her unborn burden.

My father raises colts into show horses for a living, and he’d begun grooming me to do the same. It was because of this that I managed, struggling, to guide the mare back to our stables. Her high whinnying pierced the black icy air as I reined her in.

She lay taut and struggling on the fresh hay I’d hastily spread over the stable floor. Here the air was warmer, moist with the remnants of past births (and a few deaths). I sang to her childish songs my late ma had cradled me with when I was a babe. Slowly she lost her strange fear; slowly she warmed toward me as I stroke her back, her belly, coaxing out the foal within her.

Even now through the fog of age, her eyes pierce me. I remember her gaze too clearly. The sharp, sentient, desperate eyes. She seemed to be helpless in her pregnancy. Which is unusual; all animals are born knowing how to spill forth life from their wombs. Humans wander into it fumbling and second-guessing, but not beasts.

I had barely a year of experience in my unskilled hands. So I did my best: I cradled her, sang beneath my breath, held her firmly and reached between her kicking legs as the final throes arrived and her neighing reached a crescendo.

I was not prepared for what happened next.

* *

For what seemed like an hour I sat there limply as everything I knew – about horses, about birth, about life – whirled dervish-like in the cooling air of the stable.

The mother’s eyes fluttered close; the slender body curled up limp and exhausted on the bloodied hay. Its offspring looked up at me with limpid eyes. A single snowflake landed on its perfectly formed nose.

It seemed there was nothing left for me to do.

I looked down at my suddenly-useless hands. This was nothing I’d ever been trained for.

Finally, I got up and wrapped the foal in a blanket. Whatever this creature was, it was a baby and needed shelter. That was when I heard it.

“Leave him with me.” A clearly human voice, heavy with post-natal fatigue and fading into slumber.

I knew better than to do otherwise.

They’d be gone by morning. When daylight came, they would be swept away with the wind, like a snowflake not meant to be caught by mere human hands. I had had a peek into something I was not part of; that I and my kind would never be a part of.

So I left the colt with its changeling parent. I stumbled blindly back to the familiar warmth of home, leaving this dream-like vision behind: a beautifully formed man, shivering just slightly despite his nakedness, embracing his newborn child – a beautiful, dove-grey, eight-legged foal.

~

No comments:

Post a Comment