Free Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears

lopsided they always had to look, like their legs were different lengths, up on the steeper slope above the house. She thought of the pigs lying on the special new sty floor which was designed more for winter than summer, the glass that had been mixed into concrete pressing into their hams.
    And higher, up in the scrub, wild dogs and owls getting ready for the hunt, she thought they knew too.
    Know-what- know-what , a faraway waterbird began to call from the creek.
    â€˜ No-ah, No-ah .’ Still whispering, Roley changed the call to his own. ‘ Nell-a, Nell-a? Know-what-know-what what what? ’ As stealthy as the fox slipping around the front vegetable garden, she felt the body of her new husband shifting across to love her.
    It made her feel beautiful in a far different way to how it had been with old Uncle Nip. Git out of me head, ya old rogue, she thought. You don’t belong in this starry new bed.
    If only she could’ve seen herself from the height of the guinea fowls roosting in the branches above them she’d have realised that love had altered her shape. Her waist nipped in above the bones of hips that overnight seemed more womanly. Her skin, too, sun-damaged and thinned already at twenty-two, bloomed with a kind of lustre.
    A little later, aroused by the stealth and the knowledge of Noah right there with only her nightie between her and the night, Roley moved closer. When she woke it was to find that he had begun to love her all over again even as she’d slept. ‘Nella.’
    Noah shut her eyes and opened them. Uncle Nipper had called it a teapot, but Roley’s was more like a lighthouse. ‘Roley.’ She thought of a filly winking for the stallion. Over the tiny patch of grass a cool current of air seemed to flow, yet where their bodies joined was warm and smooth. She thought of a promising new colt just beginning to sire mares around the Wirri district; my husband’s like that.
    As if in an invisible understanding of her thought he bit the side of her neck and he was that Tourmaline grabbing a mare under her mane.
    The complicity between them against the hot sleeping house so near they could hear it snoring, their sureness that they could never turn into a pair of such charred old chops as Sept and Min, meant they began to move faster.
    Then the dogs rattled their chains in their iron tank kennels and the guinea fowls took off from their roost as something huge began to roll out from the newlyweds. Over the blossomy ground, then out onto the grass beyond the jacaranda tree, their pleasure moved in a circle bigger than any show ring so far known and as bright as light itself.
    Roley wouldn’t be able to sleep for the rest of the night for thinking about the nature of his marriage. Even the old blanket under them felt full of little lightning sparks. An excitement grabbed him as he dreamt of the lorry he was going to buy. The team they’d get together. Maybe they’d get as far as Adelaide some years. Instead of Queensland, why not give the southern circuit a try, as Noey had done with her father? Set up a water jump somehow, at One Tree. Practise that in the summer months.
    He knew from the look of the light coming in the east that they’d better get going. He nuzzled Noah’s neck.
    She felt they were one, not two. His hands were playfully in her hair—feeling around, he whispered, to see if she had any wisdom lumps.
    â€˜Must be pretty wise,’ she whispered back. ‘Cos they’re big, eh Rol? Let’s see if you still got yours.’
    â€˜Laughing again, Nell.’
    When she said why, that they were like a pair of ponies with the Queensland itch scratching each other, that made him put his mouth first where her wither would be. Next onto her mouth again. But before anything could start for a third time—‘Shoot!’, he flung himself up. There was the sound of Main House stirring, someone thumping around getting life into