A horse enters a pasture

A horse leaves a pasture

No other horses come or go

The first pasture is the second pasture

But the first horse is not the second horse

Horse, Not Horse

No one quite knows where the horse came from. One evening, when leading the horses from the pasture back to the stable, there was an extra horse. It was a serendipitous occasion, for one of our stock had recently died, and there was an empty booth that filled the children’s hearts with dismay. The new horse was an oddity; while there were no major defects in its health or its personality, its delusion that it were a member of the flock was apparently quite strong.

“It’s not wild,” Clara had said, leading it by its reins. Indeed, the horse was calm. Clara moved her head back and forth, getting different angles of the horse to inspect its eyes, its teeth, its hair.

“We’ll call all the neighbors,” I said. “The Bordens, the Stuckers.”

“The neighbors,” Trent said from another stall as he removed the saddle from his ride.

“Yes,” I said.

“The neigh-bors,” he said, laughing.

Clara and I both shook our heads. Trent was getting to that age when you’re clever enough to be the only one finding something funny.

He was a hard worker though, and he was up early the next morning taking care of the cattle and the horses, so Clara went down the road and asked about the horse, and she was the one telling me it didn’t belong to anyone else on the road.

A horse is a fantastic animal, I told her, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for it to have escaped and run off a long way. In fact, it was the most likely explanation. We decided to take care of the horse until the owners might come around looking for it.

“We could put an ad out in the paper,” Clara suggested. So we decided to think about that, too.

Trent was getting pretty clever, but I never left everything to him. He was still only a kid, after all, so I would go out in the late morning to check on things and stay out for the rest of the day, most days.

I wanted to inspect the fence around the north steadings, as the wood looked to have rotted, and entire sections of the fence seemed due to be replaced. The new horse, however, did not take to Trent. As he put it: “The horse hates me, dad.” The horse took a liking to Clara, but she was busy with other matters, so I gave it a shot with the horse.

Thus, the horse’s individualities came into focus. Every horse is different; they are highly emotional and expressive. And the new horse was no exception. He would shake his head vigorously when Trent so much as took the reins, but appeared completely calm around Clara, like a lady getting her hair done.

I walked into the pasture and sized the horse up, letting it know I was there. The horse eyed me from the side, seemingly ignoring me. As I drew nearer, it turned to face me, dropping its head. Though we were face to face, I knew the horse couldn’t see me.

“Hey, there,” I said. “It’s jus’ me.”

The horse swung its neck to turn its head, looking at me with one eye. Then its entire body jolted, uncoordinated, muscles firing at different times. It leapt back and fell into a trot along the fence.

My shoulders drooped and I began to think this horse was going to be a pain. “Calm down, buddy,” I said.

The horse trotted along the fence until it reached a part shaded by tough old trees just outside the pasture. Honeysuckle vines wrapped around the high fence posts in this area. Water had collected from recent rains in this area as the ground sloped awkwardly into a trench.

The horse stepped in, splashing the shallow puddle, and took a bite of honeysuckle flower. I looked the horse in the eye as it chewed.

“You like honeysuckle?”

After that, the horse was calm.

In a nutshell, the horse was spirited, inconsistent, with the strangest anxieties and desires. You had to be a little patient with it, but if you let it do what it wanted, it would suddenly decide to do what you had wanted all along.

After a few weeks of waiting, Trent suddenly suggested at supper that the horse really ought to have a name. As soon as it said it, we all felt that we had stupidly missed the proper time to name it, though the horse could really be named at any time.

Clara looked at me questioningly. We had done our due diligence, even put in ad in the paper, and no response had been given as of yet.

“How about Honeysuckle?” I said, and she nodded in agreement with the name and the decision to keep the horse at all.

Honeysuckle never did warm up to Trent, but we got along quite well, the horse and I, and I even rode the horse on occasion, but I preferred to watch it from afar and give it a treat now and then. I was shocked one day to find that the horse liked all kinds of strange flowers, and would eat the wild grape voraciously. The horse preferred the grape to honeysuckle even, a fact I kept to myself.

The horse had shoes, but the job was poorly done. That fall, the horse was settled into the farm by then, and we sat on a stool and I showed Trent how to shave the hooves and fix the overgrowth. He seemed more disturbed by this practice than even the livebirths, but I assured him the horses were in no pain and were in fact relieved by the practice.

With better hooves the horse had a spring in its step.

“Dad, why don’t you let Honeysuckle with the other horses?” Trent asked me one day.

I hadn’t even noticed it. I had been letting Honeysuckle into the north pasture even while the other horses went out the front of the stable into the south pasture.

“It’s like with Reader,” Clara said to Trent.

“That was a horse I understood better than most,” I said, bringing the spoon to my mouth.

“You understand Honeysuckle better than most,” Trent said, half-asking.

“I spose I do,” I replied.

That spring the horse came back to the stable with a bit of a limp, and the doctor pointed out its back was sagging. Sometimes it happens like this, the doctor explained, all the invisible problems become apparent all at once. Catastrophic failure, my brother would have called it.

“What happens next?” I asked.

The doctor grimaced. “There is a surgery available, but it’s risky. Expensive.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Six thousand dollars.”

The idea of a cure came as such a relief that the amount of money hardly registered. I got back to the house late, set my keys on the hook and found Clara in the kitchen.

“What did he say?” Clara said, clasping her hands in front of her.

“There is a treatment,” I said. “But it’s six thousand dollars.”

Clara’s eyebrows went up immediately. “Can we afford that?”

I looked away, out the window into the dark. She hadn’t asked the question I wanted her to ask.

“We should do it,” I said finally.

Clara’s eyes searched for mine. “If we can.”

Honeysuckle was led into the trailer and did not resist like I expected. A bad omen, I thought. I climbed into the truck; we were towing the horse in ourselves.

The waiting room of the hospital didn’t feel like a hospital at all. The carpet and wallpaper were exactly the sort of thing Clara might do, but the gnawing dread still choked the air. We remained quiet for hours on end, a definite irregularity for Trent.

After a few hours the surgery was finished. We were able to see the horse lying down, sleeping. We would return in a few days to transport the horse back to the farm.

At the farm a special stable was constructed. The outer walls were tin nailed into concrete. The roof was oddly flat. The brand new feature stood in opposition to the rest of the family farm.

The horse was mildly confused of its new home. The floor was hard concrete. There was no hay, no trough, certainly no honeysuckle. All of the horse’s food would have to be sterile for the rest of its life. Distilled water with a special mixture of vitamins and electrolytes, and a beady, processed kibble would be all it could consume. The building had no windows, even the slightest trace of electromagnetism in the stable, and the condition of the horse would deteriorate. The building had an airlock to allow us to come and go.

Not once from that point onward did I see the horse stand; the horse only ever moved its head slowly, blinking plaintively.

“Do you think Honeysuckle is happy?” Clara said in bed one night.

I looked up from the book I was reading. I had never once asked myself if any horse was happy, and I told her as much.

“Maybe you never needed to ask,” Clara replied.

“Why?” I said, confused.

“Because the horses were always happy before,” she suggested.

“But the horses weren’t happy. Not all the time.”

“You know what I mean,” Clara said.

“I never once had a horse tell me it was happy.”

Clara sighed. “The way Honeysuckle is being kept displeases me.”

I frowned. Something about the way she said it aggravated me, but I stopped myself from replying without thinking. You’re not stupid, I said to myself. I knew what she was talking about.

“What were we supposed to do?” I asked.

Clara studied me for a while. “Farmers get more attached to their animals than anyone else, but they still have to make tough decisions.”

“We’re not farmers,” I said proudly.

“We’re homesteaders.”

I turned to look at her. “What do you want to do?”

The next morning we went into Honeysuckle’s stable together. Honeysuckle faced me with his nose in that way he always did.

“I never asked you if you belonged to anyone else,” I said matter-of-factly to the horse.

“That’s not the same Honeysuckle,” Clara said, a dissonance in her voice.

“That true?” I asked the horse. “Are you a different horse?” I poured the kibble in the perfectly clean trough.

Later that day Trent came to me while I inspected the rotted fence. “I vacuumed the stable, Dad.”

I turned to him. “Good. Honeysuckle seemed okay?”

Trent shrugged. He looked at the fence, and I turned to look at it too.

“Do you want me to take care of Honeysuckle when you’re gone, Dad?”

My head turned almost instantly, but my voice was calm. “What?”

“They said Honeysuckle could live another one hundred, two hundred years.”

My eyes filled with understanding and I looked back at the fence. Eventually I said, “If I’m gone, there won’t be much point.”

Trent gave me a look I’d made before, like maybe he hoped he wouldn’t have to make that choice, like he wished he himself had six thousand–or better yet, twelve thousand–dollars.

The next morning we opened up both the doors of the stable. It wasn’t easy to do. Both Trent and Clara were there. Honeysuckle came out and enjoyed the sunshine, but the horse’s personality was still muted, and it did not leap or play.

“This was the best way to do it,” I said. Clara and Trent nodded.

“It’s not the same horse,” Clara reminded me.

“That’s cliche,” I said, holding onto the truth.

“But it’s true,” Clara asserted.

And the horse left the pasture, but it wasn’t the same pasture it had entered.