Free Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards

uses a western saddle and puts the horse through a series of walks, trots, and canters, as though riding for pleasure. A proof was a photograph. But what she was really saying was that she’d be willing to sell this horse.
    “I ride English,” I said. In my head I was jumping up and down shouting,
She’s mine! She’s mine!
    “Could be a good endurance horse,” Sarah said. “She hasplenty of heart, good strong legs and feet, and loves to eat.”
    “I do a lot of trail riding,” I told her. Our conversation was getting positively chummy: two moms discussing the future of a kid we both knew wasn’t going to Harvard.
    “Of course, she’ll do better as she matures, when she’s five or six,” Sarah said. “If you want, Bob could work with her some more before you take her.”
    She was mine, just like that. But for how much? Sarah still hadn’t said. I had budgeted ten thousand dollars to spend on a horse. Not a lot by horse standards, but I wasn’t buying a horse for showing, I was buying a horse for pleasure riding. Even with her breeding, sired by the number-one-standing Morgan stallion, I didn’t think Georgia would cost anywhere near ten thousand.
    “Can I walk her out?” I asked, suddenly anxious about keeping a wet horse standing still on a cold day.
My
wet horse. It would also give me a chance to be alone with her to see how she moved and behaved off the bit, to see if she’d listen to me.
    Sarah threw her cigarette in the dirt and walked toward the barn. “I’ll get a halter and lead.”
    Georgia and I followed her into the barn, and I helped Bob take off her harness. Then Bob towel-dried her and brushed her down. It only took a few minutes and when she was ready, I clipped a lead line to the chin ring of her leather halter and led her out to the long dirt drive.
    It was about five o’clock, and the sun had disappeared behind a forest of evergreens on the horizon. The lightwas fading, and the air smelled of wood-burning stoves and horses. The hum of cars on the thruway was steady in the distance, punctuated by the muted roar of trucks and tractor trailers. The wind had died down, but it was still breezy enough for Georgia’s mane to flicker across my face as we walked down the drive past fields of Morgans.
    I walked, Georgia trotted. We passed dozens of grazing horses on either side of the dirt drive, and Georgia was very much aware of them. Her head swiveled from one side of the road to the other with wide nostrils, keeping up a low, throaty nicker.
    Her high-stepping trot was due in part to the shoes she was wearing. They were called trailers, a heavy shoe, designed to make a horse throw the foot high, creating that prancing effect often seen in carriage horses and saddlebreds. As lovely as it looked, to me it seemed contrived and unnatural. I’d get Georgia’s removed and replaced with plain shoes as soon as I could.
    She was three years old, and I was thirty. With any luck, we’d be together until I was in my sixties. That was a commitment, a word I hated. I thought it meant the opposite of freedom. I thought it meant you were trapped, stuck, buried. Life was over and now you had this obligation, this ever-present other who said things like “And where were you?” and “How much did it cost?” and “Why didn’t you call?”—all the none-of-your-business questions that were suddenly OK because you had a commitment. Some people called it love. I called it a burden.
    I was thinking this because I wanted Georgia to pay attention to me and she wasn’t. I wanted her to be as enthralled with me as I was with her, to feel that same chest-tugging connection. Instead, she was thinking about ditching the stranger tugging at her pretty head so she could run off and frisk with the other three-year-olds. She wasn’t interested in a doting new mommy, she was interested in grazing.
    I wish I could say all that insight saved my marriage, that I ran home to Jerry and the new Sub-Zero filled with