A Horse With No Name

From the threshold, all John could see of his mother was a tuft of chestnut hair poking up over the back of the couch. It was tangled up in the way long hair tends to do when slept on wet. Entwined in the mass were a few accenting strands of premature silver.

An uneasy feeling sat in his stomach like a little lead marble. He was nervous, but by all rights he shouldn’t have been. His mother had come home too early to notice that he’d been missing. The school wouldn't report his absence. And she’d been too exhausted to see through his honestly flimsy excuses for his thaumaturgic screwup. As far as he could tell, he’d just about gotten away with it, but he was nervous all the same.

He reviewed his perfectly normal day in his head. He caught the bus on time, sat through boring lectures, then caught a bus home. He’d forgotten to pack a lunch, so he’d hopped off a few blocks early to grab a hot dog at a dingy, convenience store. He saw his mother’s note, ordered dinner, then watched TV till the hotdog took its ****.

‘Just stick to the story and everything will be fine.’

Slowly, he circled around the couch and found her slumped deep in the couch cushions, dozing. An old crocheted blanket, with faded autumnal colors and fraying yarn, wrapped around her like a shawl and bunched up around her face, masking everything below her eyes.

Beneath the blanket, she wore a baggy grey sweat suit. Her feet, clad in fuzzy pink house-socks, rested on the coffee table next to a big brown takeout bag, a pair of plates, and cutlery.

John stifled a guilty chuckle. The mental image of his disheveled, exhausted mother answering the front door was both amusing and cruel. Given the circumstances, it was better for her to be a little embarrassed than for him to reveal magic to a mundane bystander.

As he reached down to nudge his mother awake, it occurred to him that he didn’t actually know if she was mundane. It wasn’t as if she could have told him otherwise before today. She’d have been bound to the same taboos that he was now.

John cast Observe.

No such luck.

With a few gentle nudges against her shoulder, John coaxed his mother awake, saying, “Mom, time to get up.”

Brenda waved away the prodding hand and grumbled, “Five more minutes.”

John nudged her again, a little firmer than before. “Come on. You don’t want dinner to get any colder.”

John turned and began to prepare her plate. He retrieved an extra large order of chana masala. On days like today, when Brenda dealt with surgical intervention, she preferred to eat vegetarian. Of course, she also preferred to avoid tomato sauces on days like today. That’s why she asked for anything but pizza.

‘Palak paneer might have been better,’ John thought as he heaped half the entree over a mound of basmati. The other half would be her lunch the next day. He nestled a couple pieces of naan on the plate.

When he turned back, her eyes were open just a crack. Her eyebrows fluttered as if they were fighting to hoist her eyelids open. Then they furrowed. Confusion seemed to run across her face. That uneasy marble swelled. The strangeness in the mirror, she saw it too. He placed her plate down on the table, shot to his feet, and hurried into the kitchen.

“What do you want to drink?” he called out to the living room as he retrieved a cleanish spoon from the sink and wiped away little bits of crusted yogurt. He searched his warped reflection again for a flicker of magic, but couldn’t find anything stranger than bulbous, funhouse proportions.

‘Maybe… maybe I’m just being paranoid.’

“Just water”

He tossed the spoon back into the sink and got her water. He returned to the living room and offered his mother the glass. She took it and placed it on the table.

“Come here,” she said as she reached out to him.

He complied.

Gently taking his chin, Brenda pulled John’s gaze to hers. She looked him over, then placed the back of her free hand against his forehead.

“You don’t feel warm.”

”I’m fine, Mom. It was just a gross hotdog.”

“Acute food poisoning could be staph. Are you experiencing any chills or cramps?”

“I feel fine. The grease just upset my stomach a little.”

Brenda gave her son one more look over. “Ok, but if you have any more issues tonight, you’re staying home tomorrow.”

He began to dish out his meal. As John sat down with his plate, he asked, “how are you feeling?”

There was a long silence. For a moment, John thought that his mother hadn’t heard him. Before he could repeat himself, she responded, “Fine. Tired.”

“I’ll bet with how early you left this morning. How did everything go with the mare?”

“Oh, it went fine. It was just mild dystocia.”

‘Mild dystocia?’

John didn’t need biomantic understanding to see the strangeness of the statement. Years of hearing his mother’s work stories had engraved an understanding of these sorts of things into him. Though that didn’t prevent his subconscious from simmering, brewing images of foals misaligned in the birth canal. It was a response as unpleasant as it was involuntary, doubly so given he was trying to eat.

‘Even with the drive over, it shouldn’t have taken more than a few hours to deal with. There should have been plenty of time for her to come home and get some more rest.’

“That’s good,” John replied. “With how early you left this morning, I figured it must have been pretty rough.”

“We weren’t expecting this mare to be due for another month. So, I left earlier than usual out of an abundance of caution.”

“What the fuck?” John choked in disbelief.

“Language, John,” Brenda responded in exasperation. “We talked about this.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just… how could a month-premature foal be ok?”

”It wasn’t premature, we just got the due date wrong.”

“Oh,” John trailed off. “This wasn’t a planned thing, was it?” It was a purely rhetorical question.

His mother hissed, “No, it was not.”

“What happened?”

Brenda Newman was not much of a gossip, least of all when discussing her clients. This wasn’t to say that she never discussed work. It’s just that she usually kept such discussions professional, some might say, clinical.

None of this applied to the Baxters. They weren’t clients so much as they were adopted family. Henry and Rose had been more like an aunt and uncle to John than some blood relatives. He’d certainly seen more of their kids than he’d seen of most of his cousins. For a few years, after John’s father passed, Rose would pick John up from school, and he’d play with Rob and Jo until his mother got off work and came to pick him up. Unfortunately, John hadn’t seen much of them since he and his mother moved to Springfield. He’d never even met the twins.

“So, you know Rob left for college last year?”

”Yeah, he went to… Cambridge, right?”

“Dartmouth. Well, when he left, they were expecting Jo to help pick up the slack around the farm, but she has been going through a rebellious phase. ”

“Oh, no,” John groaned.

"Oh yes. So, one day, she decided to sneak off with her friends, left a gate open, and four mares got loose. It took a week to find most of them, but one of them, today’s momma, was missing for over three months.”

“They just found her in the middle of nowhere, already pregnant.”

“No, she found her way home, already pregnant.”

“But, wait. How could it be that far off? I mean, she should have started leaking milk weeks ago. They should have noticed that.”

"She should have.” Brenda turned to her son, surprised and beaming through her exhaustion. “How did you know that?”

”You told me about this kinda stuff before.”

“Yeah, but… I didn’t think you listened when I talked about work.”

Feigning offense, John placed his plate down, crossed his arms, and turned away from his mother. “Of course I listen. I just tune out all the gross bits.”

Brenda managed a weak chuckle at her son’s antics. “Well, then you have a much broader definition of gross than I do.”

‘Not as broad as you might think,’ John mused, recalling prehistoric lunch. ‘I wonder what blood-hunter curry would taste like.’

After a brief pause to take a few more small bites of her meal, she continued, “But, back to your question, maiden mares sometimes just start producing late. Although this was uncommonly late.”

New Achievement: Look a gift horse in the mouth
Description: After all the work I did to keep her out of your way today, do you really want to draw attention to the details?
Reward: +1 Wisdom

John glanced over to check that his mother wasn’t paying attention before surreptitiously dismissing the notification.

“So, how long was Jo grounded for letting the horses escape?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

“She’s still grounded. You’ll actually get to see her soon. Her parents are enrolling her at Ashcroft so they can keep an eye on her.”

'Oh… fuck.'