SEPTEMBER 25

TITLE: none
CLASS: Intro to Fiction.
ASSIGNMENT: Write a true account of an event in your life.
Two-page maximum.

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It smelled like sweaty horses the day he left. Even after I came home, I could still smell them on me and feel the flies that landed on their hocks. I wished for a tail. Wished for a tail even after she told me that he’d been gone since eight o’clock. “For good?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, calling him your father for the benefit of her own tears. As if the dam would be broken the moment she spoke his name.

I didn’t cry. He’d been packing his bags for three years, and the horses were still leaving fresh hoof prints in my mind. Their smell was on the front burner; he’d been shunted to the back. It had been a complete consumption, the buzzards plucking at his eyes before they’d even closed, and by the time he’d finally made it over the threshold, there was no point in galvanizing the relief.

After having seen him for the last time on the previous afternoon, surrounded by all that white and silence, it was nice to have the horses. They carried away the memory of his glassy eyes and the lingering ammonia that still stung the inside of my nostrils. He was glad to see them, I knew it, glad to have pallbearers that would make me smile and forget that his address was changing: plot number 141, next to the dogwood and away from the world.

The horses were gone when we went to see him off—a bon voyage from the sunlit world to the shadowlands—but the wind still carried their smell as his footprints followed their trail.