Free Everyday Psychokillers by Lucy Corin

training stables in the dawn, birds we never saw at the lay-up stable. Instead we saw mostly cattle egrets, white birds that stood like emaciated bowling pins, one and then another in the fields, or that walked behind a grazing horse, bending in the quickest pitch of motion for any bugs lifted with the horse’s hoof. The job at Sandpiper included a camper for Gwen to live in. She’d been running the forty-stall barn herself until she got kicked, broke her arm, and convinced Joe, who owned the place, to hire my mother, who’d come looking for work.
    Between the barn and the house was a small above-ground pool, about four feet deep, about the size of a box stall, actually. When it was too hot to help my mother even by rolling bandages, I’d get to sit in the pool, and one afternoon was so hot Gwen joined me, standing on her toes, buoyant, and leaned against the pool wall with her cast on the redwood ledge, lifting one leg and then the other through the water, feeling each leg cut and bubble the water as it rose. It was so hot that although we filled it from the hose the pool grew warm as a bath. Flies circled our heads, big stinging greenheaded horseflies, and mid-sentence Gwen would dunk her head and flip her hair back, which was white and stood up like a punk rocker’s when it was wet. She flexed and unflexed her hand in the cast, touching her index finger to the plaster bridge that divided it from her thumb. From time to time she’d slide under with her arm raised, let herself slip down with her elbow at her head, making a kind of inadvertent Black Power gesture like I’d seen in movies, a gesture like an accidental cheer, her eyes closed and her face peacefully blurred underwater.
    We talked about songs on the radio and a couple other things, a couple of the horses, and a dog that had been hanging around. Then she asked me about Adam Walsh, the boy in the news who’d been abducted from our mall, whose head was found in a canal one hundred miles north of us. She asked me what I’d been thinking about that.
    Gwen knew my mother and I had fought that morning. I wanted to take the bus to the mall because some girls I knew were going. My mother said no. She said it was too complicated and she didn’t know what time she’d be done with work, or which bus I should take or what. I was mad, and hot, and a horse had stepped on my foot because it was so hot I couldn’t pay attention. I’d been walking a horse that had his legs blistered with Reducine. In fact I’d held him for the tranquilizer and watched my mother apply the black tar to his legs with a corncob, wearing rubber gloves to protect her hands. I could smell the chemicals working at his skin. My stomach quaked when I thought of it. My neck clenched as we walked.
    Heat accumulates. I can’t say it enough. It might not immediately feel hot, but when it keeps on, you get so heavy with it, it’s like wearing that many layers of clothing. It gets so it feels like you’re encased, cocooned in heat, mummified. Several times a day I’d get overcome with sleepiness. It had to do something, I swear, all that heat, it had to stunt us somehow, all the effort it took to move through it, pushing through layers and layers, the sheer intensity of attempting to move through the world, of taking it in through pores so bent on seeping, your skin so obviously a permeable membrane, and too much two-way molecular traffic.
    The skin on the horse’s cannon bones hung in flaps from the blistering, in sheets like the bark of eucalyptus trees. The goopy disinfectant ointment that covered the wounds turned from yellow to red in the heat, dripping. Dirty sand clung to me. I was in such a daze, leading him in the sun that I almost forgot him and I walked under a low branch where he couldn’t follow, so he balked and we had a little tangle. It hurt, but mostly I cried because I was so mad and frustrated and so strangely sleepy