When you were little, someone had given you a
wallet with a horse’s head in profile so you had decided you liked horses. Your
parents got you riding lessons at a local stable where you spent most of the
afternoon in a pool, supervised by disinterested lifeguards related in various
ways to the people who ran the camp. When you did get to be around horses, the
instructors told you to be extremely careful because they might kick if you
came up behind them. You didn’t know at the time, but it had recently come up
at a family lunch that the week before you had gone to the camp, a kid had been
knocked into a coma.
It was later, on an activity day at a resort you
attended with your family, that you really came to fear horses. There was an
excursion and all the kids went by bus to a ranch so that all the parents could
golf or fuck or argue. At the ranch, a huge horse with a white patch between
his eyes butted your stomach and chest with his muzzle. The ranch hand’s
explanation was that the horse was asking you for food. If he’d been a smaller
animal maybe you would have been charmed, but there was substantial force to
his nuzzling, so substantial that you had no trouble recognizing how quickly
and with what ease the animal could overpower you, harm you, kill you. You
never even climbed on the horse’s back and the stable had no other animal
available for you to ride so you did what? “I don’t remember.”
“You know, I’ve never ridden a horse,” I told you.
“What?”
“It’s just a tattoo.”
“Really?”
“Well, sort of. My last name means someone who
shoes horses.” I said.
“So it’s not really just a tattoo,” you said.
“Well, I guess my name’s just a name though,
right? I mean a horse means a lot of things.”
“I’ve been using that running horse emoji a lot,”
you told me. You used it when someone texted you to say they were running late,
or when your sister texted you to say that she and her husband had finally
cleared out the room that they planned on turning into a nursery in their small
condominium. You used it to express excitement when your friend invited you to
go see Bruce Springsteen at the Air Canada Centre.
I don’t know, but I found you charming as you know
now. I was worried that you were letting too much of your mind out to me,
maybe. Like that it might become overwhelming or exhausting. Or that you would
run out of thoughts to share.
The first time we “did it”—fucked, or “made love,”
or whatever—I thought of a horse snorting and thrashing and racing around,
white froth which was its sweat, I guess, clumped here and there on its skin as
it passed the camera. I say camera of course because I’m thinking of something
from a film. In my imagination or memory, it’s from a Terrence Malick film.
You started talking about guns because of the
six-shooter tattooed on my other wrist. When you were nearly six your
grandfather had let you fire his shotgun at a tomato juice can nestled into the
crotch of a tree and your mother, who had left you with him as she ran errands,
had arrived in time to hear the shot and had nearly killed your grandfather,
probably would have killed him if it wasn’t the death part of guns that so
profoundly offended her.
You told me that that same grandfather had used
that same gun—maybe it was a rifle—to kill a bouvier des flandres puppy, nearly full grown, whose temperament had
turned mean. Later, when you started reading through forty years of your
grandfather’s daily journals, you discovered that he’d killed the bouvier earlier the same day that he let you fire the
gun.
He also had a toy six-shooter that he had helped
you put real bullets into.
And when you were little—a little older, though,
and with the permission of your parents—you’d been skeet shooting with your
best friend, whose father hunted ducks, mostly. You were good at it. At least
you remembered being good at it. Meaning you hit things.
I had on a pair of Ray Bans that I’d found on the
street. Unfortunately, whoever had lost them had a prescription that was a bit
too strong for my eyes, but I liked how they looked perched on my head. Anyway,
I pulled them down because I didn’t want you to see my eyes when I told you
that I had the gun tattooed on my arm as a way to reclaim the idea of guns.
Through the sunglasses you looked clear, but much farther away.
“Reclaim? Why?”
I explained how, you know, people reclaimed
language that had been used against them.
“Someone used a gun against you?”
I told you how when I was twelve, my father was
held up at a gas station. A robbery.
You did this blinking thing. It was the first time
I’d seen you do it, but I’ve seen you do it since. It’s like you are trying to
bring the world into focus. Figuratively. “With a gun?” you asked.
“He was killed.”
“Oh my God. I’m sorry.”
“Why? You didn’t do it.”
You looked at some filthy spot on the floor of the
club. “No,” you said.
A member of the band turned on an amp and the
sound of a chord swelled briefly into the club. The rest of the band took their
places behind instruments and microphones.
The story of my father’s murder was true and
painful, but I told it with some frequency. There were other details, which
eventually you memorized. Like, “He had twenty dollars in his wallet.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they take it?”
“Yes.” Or, “It was as a gas station right by my
parents’ house.”
“Did th—”
The band started their first song. I got up off my
stool, grabbed my beer from the tall table beside me and put my lips up to your
ear. “What’s that?” I shouted as gently as I could over the hammering guitar.
You swallowed before you turned your head and
stretched your neck to bring your mouth to my ear. “Did they move?”
I shook my head.
You blinked again. This time it was like something
had suddenly become clear. “I’m sorry. I guess I mean did your mom move?”
I shook my head and smiled gently. I found the
modification charming. Almost thoughtful. But also very strange. As if you
thought—though I know you didn’t think—that changing “they” to “your mom” could
leap back in time to pull my mother out of the funk that followed. Funk isn’t
the word. Crippling fear, anxiety, depression, shock. PTSD. “No. We didn’t
move,” I said, but our heads weren’t close enough together for you to hear me.
You looked worried. Mouthed, “What?”
I shook my head, No. It’s nothing. Nevermind.
You leaned your head close to mine, your mouth
near my ear. You shouted, “What did you say?” then looked at me, all carefully
rendered concern.
My hesitation, my reluctance, was real.
Eventually, I leaned in to say, “It’s okay. Seriously. We can talk after the
band.”
We did keep talking after the band.
But first we stood there. I stood stiffer than
usual. You too, I realize in retrospect. Someone watching silent video of the
two of us at that show couldn’t have guessed that the band was good, that there
were grooves. A few songs in, you finished your beer, held the empty bottle in
the air in front of me—closer than it appeared through the prescription Ray
Bans—and when I looked at you, your face was asking if I wanted another. You
pointed at the bottle, just to make sure I understood. I nodded, Yes. You went
to the bar. I finished my beer while a welcome warmth started somewhere near
the bottom of my ribs and spread out. I returned the Ray Bans to their nest in
my hair.
We stood closer as we finished our second beers.
The band finished and our conversation went on to
cover Bill Callahan, a.k.a. Smog, and his lines “skin mags in the brambles/for
the first part of my life/I thought women had orange skin” which you said the
pin-up girl tattoo on my left arm reminded you of and which (the lines)
reminded you of your own earliest exposure to Playboys and Hustlers or whatever stashed under a log down a dead-end dirt lane between
your neighbour’s house and their neighbours on the other side or in a pile of
leaves behind your mom’s best friend’s house. In response to a question I asked
you inspired by your anecdotes about the skin mags, first you, then I talked
about the teachers we wish we could have kissed or fucked or who we wish could
have been our parents. At this point, the fact that we would soon sleep
together was becoming obvious. The friends we’d come with drifted to the
corners of the club. We went on. You described the bedroom you grew up in, one
wall covered in Sunshine Girls a classmate gave you, in—you realized as you
told me—some strange flirtation, probably. I described the different favourite
band posters from different points in my evolution as a music lover. I asked
you about where you lost your virginity. It was in your basement bedroom in the
house you moved to with your mom and sister when your parents got divorced. It
happened on a summer afternoon after a walk by the Sixteen Mile Creek a few
weeks before you moved out on your own. You asked me where I lost mine. It was
a bathroom at a party after the person I was with, not dating but talking to,
someone I knew from school, confessed that they were a virgin despite the story
they’d made up for their friends and I said that I too was a virgin, and while
I wasn’t so ashamed that I made a secret of it, that I would be happy to break
the ice or come of age or come with someone else—or whatever it took to lose my
virginity—so we snuck into the bathroom and locked the door and fumbled our way
through it while people banged on the door and speculated about who was taking
so long before being swept back into the party by whatever.
We were among the last to leave the club. Your
friends had left, my friends had left. The bands had loaded out and the
bartender had turned on the lights. We held hands down the stairs from the
venue and we walked a block in no direction. When you asked where we were
going, I kissed you under a streetlight. The beer on my breath must have
neutralized the beer on your breath because I tasted you. Your taste is like
oatmeal with milk and brown sugar. Sure, sometimes the milk is sour. Or the
oatmeal is thin. And in the morning there is something off in there, like maybe
an unfinished bowl of oatmeal got dumped into the compost bin and while it
remains the most prominent smell, the rotting vegetables and leftovers and the
drying coffee grinds are an unpleasant counter-scent.
A streetcar rattled by and we interrupted that
first kiss and walked down the first residential street we came to. In a
parkette we found, I backed you into a play structure and held your head with
both hands and looked at you. You were expectantly expressionless, your mouth
open, your breath shallow. You shivered. We continued our kiss, this time more
forceful and purposeful. With your teeth, you gently held onto my lower lip as
I pulled back to change angles and I nearly came.
I knew I didn’t want to have sex that night,
though. I don’t know why. Maybe I knew there was enough to savour already.
Maybe I wanted the first time to be special. Maybe it was just that it was too
late, way too late in the night and I needed the few hours of sleep I could
still get before I went to my mom’s place to celebrate my grandmother’s
birthday. “I have to go.”
“Uh—” You shook violently. “Okay.” I put my hand
to your sternum, my fingers brushing your clavicle. Your heart beat like it was
oversized, a horse’s heart or an elephant’s. Elephants are beautiful creatures,
you know.
“I have family shit tomorrow.”
You nodded.
I kissed you, kept my one hand against your chest
so you wouldn’t blow away, then I put my free hand between your legs. You
moaned into my mouth at a frequency that vibrated and warmed my ribcage. I
moved my hand to your right pocket, squeezed my fingers past the hem and pulled
out your phone. I pulled my lips from yours.
With your eyes closed, your head leaned forward
like our lips were magnetized.
I woke your phone up, tried to open it, but it was
password protected. I held it out to you for you to unlock it, but you told me
your passcode. You had to tell me twice, I was so unprepared for this openness.
I went to your contacts and added my name and phone number. I checked it twice
to make sure I hadn’t mistyped something. “I should be done at my mom’s by,
like, eight at the latest.”
“Can I text you?”
“Can I come to your place?”
“Yes,” you whispered and shook.
“Walk me to the streetcar?”
You agreed. We held hands like we were new to it,
trying different positions to find which brought us closest, which felt best.
You waited for the streetcar with me. You leaned against the shelter’s glass. I
faced you and let your fingers explore my knuckles, my nails, my fingers, the
lines on my palms. My breathing was shallow. Then I explored your hands. You
blinked away tears or sleep.
We heard the streetcar’s metallic call as it
stopped two blocks away, its three front lights looking right at us.
“Text me as soon as I get on the streetcar,
please. So we make sure.”
“I’ll text you now.”
“Yeah.”
You looked strange lit by the phone’s screen. You
wrote your full name and I pulled out my phone to wait for it to buzz through.
It did. We kissed again, kissed until the streetcar’s lights were brightening
one side of us.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“Later today,” you said.
I looked back once as I climbed the streetcar's
steps. You smiled. I stood above an empty seat so I could watch you as the
vehicle pulled away. You stood there watching me for a long enough time that I
didn’t see you turn and point yourself towards home.
Toronto, July-Aug 2016
Emoji sequence: Eleanora Ferrari
Story: Lee Sheppard
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