WINTER ' FOURTEEN
PEGASUS
by Mara Buck
The golden horse was broken. It was a palomino, but she hadn’t known that at the time. She had only
blindly loved it as her favorite, had been so since she was little and it had pranced with the other horses
along the mahogany mantle beside her grandfather’s rocker. For decades the horse galloped through her
dreams. Sometimes she clung to his back and other times she raced beside him, her hair and his mane
mingling in wind-driven meadow grasses. He was her talisman, her savior, her protector. Now his pieces
sprawled broken within crumpled tissue. The movers had said, “Sorry” and had themselves moved on.
Vera hummed as she worked, composing a private melody, lullaby-soft as she glued the horse together.
She pricked her thumb on one of the shards, but so intent was she on her task that she never noticed,
and her blood seeped into the porcelain, staining the roughness of the broken leg. On a scrap of paper, a
scrid really, she jotted a few tiny words to her grandfather, like birdsong on a summer’s day, the thinnest
quill of message to take flight, and she rolled up the paper and stuffed it into the hollow leg. The glue from
the hot gun singed her fingers while she stoically pinched the fragments tight until the golden horse was
able to stand once again. His neck was arched and his mane flowed as gloriously as ever and his right foreleg
pawed the air. He was her only family now. There would be no others. Not since the miscarriage. Never
more since Darrell had kicked her down the stairs. Today her limp was hardly noticeable, and the outer
scars were only the lines holding her pieces together.
Each thing she did she did reflexively as if done many times before, without thinking, yet it was as if
the first time for everything. Vera had no use for time.
*
The Linnet's Wings