Free Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

apple whole. He licks my neck and face from the collarbone all the way up my cheek. My mother says it’s just for the taste of salt, but I know it’s love.
    Our progress with training is slow. He likes to play hard-to-get. I stand at the gate and call his name and up pops his head. On a good day he casually picks his way around the reeds and tall grasses and moves in my general direction. More often than not we have a chase. I climb through the fence, halter and rope behind my back. He waits until I get within arm’s reach, just close enough to offer an open palm with a piece of horse candy. He extends his neck, lips up the treat, and spins around, galloping off to the other side of the pasture.
    Often it’s dark by the time I catch him. Just in time for his dinner.
    He hates saddles. When I tighten the cinch, he sucks in air and swells his belly, waiting to exhale until I get my boot in the stirrup. I swing up on his back and the saddle flips under his belly. He turns to look at me on the ground, pleased with his success.
    I decide bareback is best.
    A successful mount doesn’t mean a successful ride. If Tonka doesn’t want to go anywhere, he doesn’t. He just stops. All sorts of things capture his interest: dogs, cats, butterflies, weeds. Even bushy purple-topped thistles, which he likes to pluck and eat with bared teeth to avoid pricking his lips. He’s a renegade, but he has delicate table manners. If I urge him forward with my heels—or spurs, a poor suggestion from my mother—he rears straight up, again and again, like a mechanical horse, knocking me in the face with the back of his head. His aim is pretty good, and more than once I stagger into the kitchen with blood dripping from my nose.
    Glen, who’s still working off his debt to my father, offers his advice. “Break a water balloon over the top of his head,” he says. “The horse willthink it’s blood dripping down his face and he’ll never rear up again. It never fails.”
    It fails. Aiming is difficult and a water balloon, it turns out, is hard to break on a moving target. The balloon splashes on the ground. Tonka twists his head around and looks up at me as if to ask,
Are you an idiot?
    A truce is declared. For the moment it seems just fine to sit on Tonka’s warm back under a tall cottonwood tree next to the irrigation ditch that runs across the back of our property. I drop the reins and Tonka drops his head and his eyes half-close in a doze. I lie back and rest my head on his haunches, soft as a pillow. We listen to the meadowlarks and horseflies and the constant drone of construction workers.
    O NE AFTERNOON my sister Karin and I notice a car parked on our street with a woman asleep on the backseat. The window is cracked. We peer in to see if she’s sleeping or dead. Her jaw is slack and her skin pasty white. The front seat is a jumble of clothes and toiletries. “She’s dead,” Karin says. A blanket that must have covered her legs has slipped to the floor of the car. “Someone killed her.” Karin is the kind of girl who will grow up to love Freddy Krueger movies.
    “She’s not dead,” I say. “There’s no blood.” By the time we get home and tell our mother, the car has disappeared.
    Our mother is reassuring. “She just needs to find a new home, that’s all,” she says. “Sometimes people get caught in circumstances.”
    I wonder if she has a husband, or a job.
    “Maybe she’s an alcoholic,” Karin volunteers.
    My mother’s look is sharp. “How do you know that word?” she asks.
    “I don’t know,” Karin retorts, and the matter is dropped. I add the word
alcoholic
to the list of words we’ve been strictly instructed never to say, words like
shit
and
fuck
and
damn
. Even
dang
is off-limits. “Just say
uff-da
,” my mother instructs. “That’s what good Norwegians say.”
    We are well-behaved children. We know what not to say. Money, religion, politics, liquor: mum’s the word. If you can’t say anything nice,