24th
Longyearbyen
Number one reason for five graves: we are appropriate. One grave per horse. I must say HORSE lest memory slap back, but I wish it were some other animal. Each black hole in the ground oozed black. Each encircling tree sapped black to build a wall against strangers. The crowd long gone. At first, the five horses avoided the graves, were a giant mobile hanging from a greater hoof that kept them trotting! We watched from inside the trellis, our eyes patterned after trellises, our dresses the color of magic trellis-born beans. All this near Longyearbyen (we were led here by a blind baby, x-tra charisma), all this near Office Pond, all this near Doctor’s Cottage, all this after the screening of the civil rights film everyone hated (my limp claw on the projector). Only two of us left to watch the first horse gallop in and break its neck on a wall of dirt. One to gasp a cloud like the dirt-cloud accompanying the fall (me). One to say something bland and blandly palliative (a mom). A mom to say something like, “Life can be hard.”
