Free Funerals for Horses by Catherine Ryan Hyde

my say-so.
    Nobody else seemed to like it.
    The man—I think his name was Frank—hauled me out of there and asked who I belonged to, but by then I’d forgotten. By then I thought I belonged to the earth and the sky, and the sharp, pushing blades of grass that grew for me.
    Simon came and found me in time, and from then on they’d call him to come get me. Since he couldn’t be reached at work, and he didn’t come home until six, and since it caused a great stampede to scare me in any way, I found plenty of time to pursue equine grace.
    Standing in that paddock, shuffling in the green grass, the blue sky looked a mile wide, and I had to squint against the open brightness of the world. But as soon as Simon packed me in the car to go home, the world narrowed and drew in, going to gray at the edges.
    By the time we got back to our room, I had to stand a foot away and squint into his face as he talked to me, to follow his lips. Sometimes my hearing went a little flat, too.
    “We’re taking you to a doctor,” he said one day, and I eventually conceded, though I felt it might be cheaper and more direct to allow me to stand out with the horses.
    Simon bought me a health insurance policy, which required physical exams, and he stood close to me and held my hand during the eye exam, and talked to me about horses, and the harmonica Mrs. Hurley had given him, that used to belong to her freeman grandfather, and the tattoo of the rose I saw on her left shoulder. I’d forgotten all that. He even made me laugh, reminding me what she’d said when I saw it. “Never really know somebody, do you, child?” with a high-pitched giggle she usually reserved for evenings after a few slugs of apricot brandy.
    I was diagnosed as having twenty-twenty vision.
    Then Simon waited awhile to take me to the doctor, so it wouldn’t appear shady.
    In the evenings Simon and I would walk up to Griffith Park Observatory, or drive up if it had been a long day. Simon liked to look down at the lights of the city, and up at the lights of the stars, preferably both on the same night. He said it gave him a sense of perspective, how everything is relative to everything else. He said it reminded him that the world was so much bigger than just the part we’d already lived.
    We’d stand in line to look through the telescope, sometimes twice in one night, at Mars, or the moon, and the astronomer would tell us which craters we could see, or the name of a mountain range. I think he liked us.
    Simon told him he wanted to be an astronomer, but I didn’t know yet that he meant it. We’d stay after, when the viewing time was over, and Virgil—that was the astronomer’s name— would show us pictures in his books of the planets.
    Maybe he took a liking to us because Simon told him we were on our own, that he, Simon, was my legal guardian and worked as a gardener to support us both.
    At first I thought I might have ruined things by telling Virgil what I thought about the man in the moon. I said I knew exactly how he felt, floating up there in space, the only life on his barren planet, seen by a billion people who never believed he was real. Virgil thought about it awhile, then told me that just about every human being on earth must have felt that way at one time or another.
    Still, I think it was Virgil who talked Simon into taking me down to County Mental Health. Not in a mean way. I think Simon asked him what to do, and that was his best answer.
    Two things might have happened to cause Simon to ask for that advice. The first was the test results. I had an eye exam, and a brain scan, neurological testing, the whole nine yards. I was fine. Textbook normal. That concerned him, I think, because he might have wanted them to find some simple, obvious condition that could be treated with a drug or whatever.
    Then, upset by this news, he came to me one night and asked me to promise never to do what our sister DeeDee did.
    “Sure, Simon,” I said, “no problem.” I was