The Horse

Before we moved into the house where I grew up, we rented a stone house at the end of a crescent-shaped road. It was just temporary, my parents said, but it seemed as if we lived there a long time. The house was a dark and gloomy place with a strange upstairs balcony that had huge sliding doors. The doors were a mahogany color, and that only added to the gloom of the house. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sneak out onto the balcony, crack the doors, and spy on my parents in the living room below.

My mother was often sewing and smoking and my father scribbling on yellow pads or finishing the crossword puzzle and sipping a cocktail. They sometimes uttered a word or two to one another, but mostly they sat in silence. It seemed as if they existed more in a painting than in real life. This balcony gave me an odd purchase on them.

I was frightened by this house. We had recently moved from a cramped apartment on the North Side of Chicago, and I wasn’t used to so much space. It seemed like a place where monsters could hide under the bed, and often I made my parents check to make sure there weren’t any. The only thing good about living there, as far as I could tell, was that around the corner and down the road was a field, and in the field lived a horse. The horse was brown and seemed friendly. I was too small to walk there on my own, but I’d see the horse when we drove by. It would run across its paddock to the fence, where it would stand, swishing its tail.