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“I’ll have him shot”

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Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

_ _

“If I have to leave, he’s not coming with me.”

I step back, halfway to holding up my hands as if such a futile gesture will stop the words once they’d begun. But she keeps going, lips moving in such a reasonable fashion that it is a shock to hear just what comes out of them. Her face is framed by a halo of white hair, but there is nothing angelic about her.

“I won’t take him from his home. I’ll have him shot.”

My horse munches behind me, a looming, grey shape that suddenly seems oh so very far away. Lower jaw slack, I try to form words, but nothing comes out. The stables are quiet, darkness licking at the doorway where the interior lights do not reach.

She shakes her head, looking down at her boots.

“If Sharon leaves, I have to leave too – she’s my friend.”

This doesn’t seem like any reason to have a horse shot. My head spins and I fiddle with the grooming kit, if only to have something to do with my hands. The gears in my brain aren’t working nearly quickly enough as her horse lifts his head from his feed, a few flakes of chaff dropping back into his bucket.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. It is no reason to have a horse put to sleep. It should be the last reason to put a horse to sleep.

She looks at me expectantly. I wonder if she thinks I’ll agree. I wonder if she thinks that I’ll say I’ll leave, just to stop her horse being shot, as she so kindly puts it. No one has asked me to leave, but I think they want me to, expect me to.

Say something, damn you!

_ _

But something to make it all right again just isn’t there. I’m not superwoman. I wish I was.

“Does he have any other health issues then?” I manage to force out, though I’m still shocked at the steadiness of my own voice; maybe it hasn’t really hit me yet. “He looks well.”

“Oh, nothing bar the arthritis. I just don’t want the hassle anymore.”

That stings, a deep, slow, burning sting that sears through my veins, coming up from the core of my being. I suck in a breath, holding myself firm and fast. He munches, head firmly down in his feed as if that is the most important thing in the world for him. He’s tied on a loose rope, though there’s never any worry of him pulling back – he’s a very good boy.

Think, woman, think…

_ _

“Well, I’m more than happy to help out, bring him in and do what I can – anytime really.”

But she’s already shaking her head and I think I already knew, even as I tried to offer assistance, that it was going to be turned down. I live in hope. She could still be reasonable. But she looks at me with pity shining in her eyes – tears? Are those really tears? – as if I am the greatest fool in the world.

“I only trust Sharon.”

There’s certainly something pointed behind those words, but I can’t focus on that right now: she doesn’t want help. She just wants him shot. She wants him gone. The horse that stayed with her for nearly twenty years, that was her companion for a large part of her life.

And now she wants to put a barrel between his eyes. Bang. Gone. All those years left meaning nothing, nothing at all.

“I don’t want the stress of it.”

But it doesn’t have to be stressful, I want to tell her, but she does not want to solve the stress, as the de facto head of the yard, a yard manager of sorts who is not employed as one. The other livery threatened my partner, to get her sons to sort out his attitude, but that apparently means nothing. It’s easier to work on me, nail the blackmail and remind me, whatever happens, it’s all in my hands.

It’s not. But it is. My hands are red with pre-emptive responsibility.

And then she’s gone. I said my goodbyes without locking on to the conversation, numb and struggling to catch up, to understand what was happening. For it all seems like a dream – no, a nightmare. A nightmare is all it is.

Only a living nightmare is the very worst one of all.

She doesn’t have to go. He doesn’t have to go. My chores are done, but I can’t leave. What if he’s not there in the morning when I come back? I ignore the tears. Why? I don’t understand! Why has something that is supposed to be so much fun – love and life with horses – come to something so vicious and malicious?

There’s nothing to do. Nothing I can do. Home beckons and I talk it through with my partner, but what sense can we make of this? It’s cruelty, it’s neglect. It’s something that no one but the owner has any sort of control over.

And yet the control is placed in my hands with a dismissive wave. They may as well have smirked and told me that it was all my problem now. I only wish they’d handed me the lead rope with the horse attached to it. That would have been an easier problem to deal with that the one dead in the ground, or his ashes floating on the wind.

I close my eyes, safe in bed. But I cannot sleep. I see him flat out, a cluster of people around him. A red sunset paints the sky and it should be beautiful, but it’s not. It can’t be beautiful every again.

He doesn’t lift his head.

“It’s her fault he’s gone,” they say, but I don’t know who speaks. “It’s her fault.”

He’ll never lift his head again. He’ll never graze again. He’ll never trot again.

I toss and turn, sheets wrapping around my ankles, trapped and alone. Should have gone, should have tried harder, should have been nicer, should have gone along with things…

Dark eyes turn on me, but there’s no brightness in them, those hollowed out pits.

“It’s her fault.”

My fault.

They blame me.

I’m to blame.

“I just had him shot.”