The Secret Language of Horses

This is how it feels, she said in words that only she understood, while standing between the promise of a cadmium sunny day and the oblivion of shady breezes. This is how it feels to be alleviated from the snarls and whines of the old man’s blazing rationale. He’d lay traps for her in hopes that she’d bend over and reveal the grassy moistness of unplowed fields. She knew his games and refused to budge as he dropped objects on the floor in a maelstrom of geriatric angst.

His son had hired her as a companion and cook to care for the needs of his ailing father. It had seemed like an easy gig at the time, but it didn’t take long for the old man to reveal his true nature. But she’d found ways to cope. When she wasn’t avoiding his constant barrage of requests to bend over him so that her breasts were close enough to clasp, she prepared nutritious meals, ladled with saliva.

Revenge was not only sweet, but it slurped.

Learning to put up with him and make-do in order to keep the free room and board that was part of her pay, meant more to her than the pocketful of cash she was paid on a monthly basis. The room wasn’t fancy, but it was hers and thankfully it rested on the top of a steep staircase, which the old man was unable to climb. She loved to walk around naked on the landing knowing he was below slithering along like a slug, leaving trails of decay.

“Hush-hush,” she murmured, in her own secret language in the silence of her room. These words were hers alone. She’d been making them up since childhood. No one must know what she said or that she and the old man existed on the fringe of the tangibly awful. She’d say it in her words, but no one else’s. This is how she remained sane. This is how she was able to pretend that everything was fine and that the horses that galloped on the wallpaper of her room, were free. Sometimes at night she could hear their hoof beats and snorts of exhaustion. She would speak to them and they would gentle until morning light sent them galloping away once again.

When she had to take him out, she’d roll him around in his wheelchair pretending that all was well. Now she could end her ruse because he had disappeared one afternoon when she’d not quite so accidentally left the backdoor open, and they’d found him half-dead and clinging to an old oak tree. It didn’t take long for eternity to finish what her forgetfulness had begun and he had been assigned to a place beside family pets, critters and dead relatives in the family plot.

“Strong enough to kill a horse,” she whispered in her secret, beautiful words. “Strong enough to kill the whole world if I want to,” she said when the son came to her some days later and said that he loved her.

He thought she was being flirtatious as she slowly formed each syllable of each mysterious word she spoke.

“Perhaps someday you’ll teach me your language,” he coaxed drawing her to him, “My father swore that he almost understood you at times.”

“Is that so, she said, finally in English. “No one understands me, but horses.”