High Horse

by Taylor Gordon

The trees hang low with rain. I smell the worn-out earth. I smell night coming. In this place, the time is always dusk. Something is always hiding in the trees. I pick blooming weeds, hold them between my thumb and finger. Their prickly stems itch my skin.

I carry the flowers inside where Grandmother is sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of syrup-sweet muscadine wine. The insides of her lips glisten.

When she drinks, the forgetting is worse.

“In the garden, life is like molasses,” she says. She says, “Love turns us into honeybees.”

Now that I am back in Grandmother’s house, I dream every night. The dreams are memories of my past life, the gray fabric on the walls of each cubicle, the telephone ringing. I sleep in the room that belonged to my father, before. Underneath the cedar desk, he carved the name of every girlfriend he ever had. When I can’t sleep, I lay on the floor and trace each name with my finger until I know them all by heart.

After dinner, we play Scrabble. Wooden tiles clicking, the only sound in the house.

Grandmother plays words like “qi” and “chutzpah.”

“Where did you learn these words?” I wonder. “You girl who was born in a holler in eastern Kentucky where the mosquitos and hunger were a cocoon at night, whose father was a bootlegger, who rode to school on the back of the postman’s horse?”

I’m building myself a new desk with wood from the willow that fell last spring. Grandfather cut the fallen tree into logs before he died. There are ghosts in the wood of the tree, like the ghosts of my father’s girlfriends who live in the desk in his room.

The girlfriends perch on the edge of the mattress while I sleep. They rake their fingers through my hair.

There is hardly ever a time here that is not like summer. Frogs scream beneath the bushes, by the creek. They come up on the porch like a plague. We leave the windows open in the house, and the rain warps the floorboards. Grandfather would cry to see the cedar planks he logged and sanded swell, turn white, but Grandmother and I accept the way the house is changing, how it is growing bones and teeth.

I go with Grandmother to pick out her casket. The funeral home is the same one that embalmed and displayed Grandfather’s body for three days while his childhood friends and college roommates and all the women he knew came through and stared at his face carved from wax.

The facsimile of his enormous white hands.

The mortician shows Grandmother a showroom, a catalogue. Pine boxes and mother-of-pearl enameled sarcophagi with gold filigree. She is confused by so many choices. I see her slipping. Starting to forget.

Grandfather’s ghost appears in the kitchen.

Grandmother, who is rinsing milk from her cup, sees him first.

“Harlan,” she says. When I look where she is looking, he is there, his pale moon face reflected in the dark kitchen window.

It’s Thanksgiving.

Grandmother and I eat dinner alone at the table. Everyone else is dead except for us and Uncle Ricky, who is mysteriously absent. I cook wild rice stuffing and soup made with mushrooms I found in the forest, where the giant, feral dogs run loose.

Grandfather’s ghost is quiet. He watches us through the window. Later, Grandmother can’t get to sleep. I can hear her downstairs moving in the dark whenever I wake from a revolving door of dreams where I am in meetings, where I am running to catch the bus.

In the garden, blooms the size of a man’s head bow so low their petals kiss the dirt.

Bees crawl on my skin. They probe the hair on my arms with eager tongues.

Uncle Ricky fought a war in the jungle. He killed men. He talks about it every time he comes here.

“That’s men. Plural,” he points out, wiggling his bushy black eyebrows.

He shows up when it’s raining like a snake winding through the tall grass. He smells like wet skin, like sweet mud and freezer burn. When he comes, Grandmother is agitated. When he leaves, she slams the door behind him. Spits three times.

A wild dog comes to the yard at dusk. It stands as still as a statue on long, white legs and watches me with yellow eyes.

I remember the arena in the forest behind my elementary school, the rough-hewn benches in a circle, the skinny pine trees quaking overhead. The ground was carpeted with needles. I remember a girl there, or being a girl there, with long hair and wide-open eyes.

The lightning bugs come out at dusk when the air is cool for the first time since morning and steam curls off of the driveway. I was a girl on this hill, who chased the flashes of light into bushes, up trees, who filled a jar so full the bugs couldn’t fly and were all dead by morning. Now one lands on my knee and blinks its mating signal—tremulous, imploring. I crush its exoskeleton against the denim of my jeans and spread a shimmering trail of innards up my thigh.

When Uncle Ricky was just a memory, I remembered him smelling like beef and blood.

It must have been afternoon, the sun slanting sideways through the living room.

I didn’t know back then how heavy a man could be.

I find Grandmother talking to Grandfather’s ghost at the breakfast table, pouring coffee into his favorite Kennedy Space Center mug. I am afraid I have a meeting to get to, that I am running late, but she pats my hand and pours a cup for me.

I ask Grandfather where he has been. Demand to know why he is back. He blinks at me with black eyes. Smiles without teeth.

There are animals moving at the bottom of the yard. In the twilight, I can’t make them out. I can only sense them. I don’t know exactly what they are. But they feel, in all that darkness, like the giant fish that live at the foot of the dam, where there are no natural predators and the water is pink with chum. Catfish the size of compact sedans, says Uncle Ricky.

Mouths full of small, sharp teeth.

A thunderstorm is blowing in from the gulf when Uncle Ricky pulls up the hill in a red pickup truck. The rattling stereo plays Kenny Rogers. He parks diagonally across the driveway and steps out, bracing his hands on his hips.

Grandmother and I are on the porch shucking peas. I am thrilled by the crisp release as I pull the thread that splits the pod to reveal the amniotic green bodies inside. Grandmother will pucker her lips around the pod and suck all of the peas into her mouth. Pop pop pop.

But now she is watching Uncle Ricky, her gnarled hands in her lap.

“Ain’t she a beaut?” he asks, posing like a boat show model, arms outstretched. He comes to the porch, picks up a pod, and snaps it in two. He eats the peas and throws the hull into the grass. He picks another. “Got her for a steal, too, down at Lucky’s Auto. They don’t even run a credit check. You believe that, Ma?”

Grandmother carries the bucket of glistening peas inside. When I leap to help her, she waves me off. I can see that the hand she waves has cramped almost closed from the shucking.

When she is gone, Uncle Ricky sits on the bench beside me. He looks out over the black-green lawn, then pulls a thin, pungent cigar from his breast pocket and unwraps it. His knee is touching mine. He turns away from me and flicks his lighter.

Uncle Ricky stays for dinner, and Grandfather’s ghost stays away. Grandmother won’t eat. I’m not sure she could pick up her fork if she wanted to, her hands frozen into fists, but she doesn’t let me serve her any of the peas or the leftover chicken. We don’t make a special meal for Uncle Ricky. He eats more than his share of what we had planned for ourselves.

When he is gone, Grandmother prays.

“The dogs in the forest are hungry,” she says when she is done. “They will dig up bones tonight.” She struggles to her feet. Outside, a full moon shines on the lawn. Night is day.

In the room that belonged to Uncle Ricky, I find other ghosts. Different ghosts. These ghosts are more like creatures than the ghosts of my father’s girlfriends, which are like girls. Uncle Ricky’s ghosts hide in the closet, under the bed. They have long hair and thin bodies.

That night, I dream of pine trees.

We light a fire for the end of winter. Grandmother burns the plants that died in the ground, the dead ends of those that survived. I chop up the old desk with Grandfather’s axe and feed it piece by piece into the flames.

The ghosts of my father’s girlfriends watch the fire from my bedroom window. Their translucent bodies reflect the orange light. They press the palms of their hands to the glass.

Their fingerprints leave a pattern of frost.

When Grandmother forgets my name, I wonder if I’m really here. Am I really on the hill at the edge of the world where muscadines fall off the vine at the end of summer, where we crush them between our toes? Did I ever have a mother, or was I raised by the dogs in the forest? The ghosts of my father’s girlfriends?

When Grandmother forgets my name I’m not sure I ever had one. I go through the clothes in the closet of my father’s bedroom, which belong to other women. I try on dresses that come with ancestors and adopt new lives.

When Uncle Ricky crashes his red pickup truck on Good Hope Road, flips it twice and dies on impact, Grandmother prepares a meal of fresh bread and vegetables from the garden. The ghosts of my father’s girlfriends shimmer in the steam above the stove. They sit with us at the table, in all the empty chairs.

The other ghosts, Uncle Ricky’s girls, come out of his room for the first time. Each one of Uncle Ricky’s ghost girls looks like me. They tiptoe down the stairs, heads up, sniffing the air.

Taylor Gordon is from Chattanooga, GA but currently resides in Laramie, WY. Keep an eye out for more of her pieces here at High Horse and all over the multiverse.