Free Apocalypse by Nancy Springer Page B

loss of civil liberties.
    Ma Wilmore knew nothing of freedom of choice. Cally had never asked—Cally had been taught early in life not to rock the familial boat—but she felt reasonably certain that her mother-in-law approved of the anti-abortion law.
    Ma served dinner without turning off the TV. Over the cartoon clamor she insisted, “That girl on the white horse, Cally, do you know who she was?”
    She worked the same vein throughout supper. As she chattered, Pa Wilmore smiled across the table at Cally and teased the kids with his hand, with which he could convincingly portray a werewolf, a bat, and other diabolical beasts; he had lost most of his fingers in a corn-picker accident as a boy, and apparently had loosened some joints as well, for he could manipulate the stubs in a most ungodly manner. Tammy and Owen never failed to squeal for him.
    â€œElmo, stop that,” commanded Ma Wilmore without heat. Her husband’s wing-shaped eyebrows showed him to be a puckish character, and she had known it when she had married him. “Cally, have something to eat. I worry about you. One of these days you’re going to starve yourself into nothing and blow away.”
    Dinner was meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy, none of which Cally was eating. She saw the children gulping the food and knew it was tasty; Ma Wilmore’s cooking was always good. She felt the pinching of her empty stomach and her smothered anger. The pain rewarded her more than food would have. She was Cally the Master of her Self, superior to all this. She would never be like these bovine Hoadley women. She would never be fleshy and complacent and gossipy like them. She knew how Mark detested his mother. He would never detest her the same way. She would be thin, a princess, and he would love her.
    Family was family, and from that there seemed to be no escape. But her body was her own. And the more Ma Wilmore urged her to eat, the more politely she refused.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Shirley stood at the fence, waiting—not at all the usual pastime for her, not when she could have been doing something. But there was a waiting feeling in the yellow air over Hoadley.
    She leaned against the house fence: her show-them fence, not an ordinary pasture fence. She had built it out of posts and chicken wire, and the wire served no purpose to keep anyone or anything in or out, least of all chickens—Shirley might as well have put up the posts alone and had it done with, because on the posts were the soul of the structure. Atop each one she had placed a horse: molded plastic horses with their cowboy saddles and studded bridles as much a part of them as their serrated manes and knife-edge tails. Dun, dapple, pinto; wide-eyed, savage-toothed, head-tossing, wildly galloping horses salvaged out of junkyards and attics and weedy back yards all the way from California. Tiny, pudgy, fierce-looking horses little lads had once whooped and bounced on. Shirley had carefully patched the holes in their shoulders and flanks where the springs or the rockers had gone. Elspeth, complaining, had repainted them for her with an expert airbrush. Now they surrounded the farmhouse, five feet in the air, each with a post set in its stretched, flying belly. Beautiful.
    Shirley had gotten the idea from a place she had seen somewhere out west, a shack with cows’ skulls set on each of its fenceposts, alternately school-bus yellow and Rustoleum black. To Shirley the sight had seemed somehow ominous, depressing, tipping the balance of things in the world toward the dark side, and instinctively she had set herself to provide a counterweight. The yellow and black cow skulls had been ugly. Her horses were beautiful. She had placed herself in the line of battle. In her mind, it was that simple.
    She leaned, shoulders against a fiercely galloping little palomino, and watched Elspeth riding her tall red bay mare around and around the training ring.
    Having Elspeth around the