by Marin Smith
Out among the warm-striped badland spires, sanctuaries of scrappy plantlife with a stubborn will to live, I’ve seen wild horses. Seen them at dusk and in the morning, as the sun began to broil the sandy washes and the cicadas began their song. To see them run, flying really, over the rocks and sage, flying along through the open like beadwork, disturbing hunkered-down rabbits and perched ravens as they pass.
Every time I see them, I look for Faith. In my mind’s eye, I can see her thick black mane, her compact frame, the curl of her sweet, perky ears, the lift of her tail. Of course I know better—Faith wasn’t even wild anymore by the time I met her, but have you ever looked for someone anyway, knowing you won't find them?
When I first met Faith, she was looking out of place in a pipestall turnout the size of a small bedroom. The freeze brand on her neck indicated she’d been swept from the land in 1999, somewhere in Nevada, where there’s not near enough grass to sustain the number of horses. Our lives intersected just right: she had lost her freedom four years earlier, and I was just gaining mine, a seventeen-year-old horse girl without a horse. A friend of mine had bought Faith from the Bureau of Land Management for $125. He let me ride her for free.
The afternoons we had together were spacious and meandering. She wasn’t a show pony and I wasn’t either—we were both just looking for a good time, I think. We found it in flushing coyotes from bushes and plucking oranges from the nearby grove; finding shade in the peppertrees and sidestepping rattlers we encountered more than once. She never once threw me off, and not for lack of her happily bucking as we rambled up the steep hill behind the stable.
I search for her now in every horse I meet. She is hard to find. She’s not in this gelding with his deadpan look, nothing but the grainbag on his mind. She’s there a little bit in a paint gelding I rode up a mountain once, in his restless head tossing and his playful tonging of the bit. She’s there when I get the sense a horse really looks back at me, or listens with both ears.
When the wild horses appear—in reality, in my dreams, or as I scroll through horses for sale online—it’s that small, jet-black mare I look for. I imagine how I’d slide onto her back like a broken-in boot, wedged and warm and form-fitting. I think of how I hoped I helped set her free, and how she provided me, all those years ago, a hold.
Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and an Enneagram 4. She has an M.A. in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her work has been published in Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, CALYX Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Sky Island Journal, Hollow and Sky, and others. You’ll find her in the garden, coffee in hand.
Emerge Literary Journal 