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Heather was like any other twelve-year-old girl with twelve-year-old dreams. Only two things would make her the happiest girl in the world. She wanted that cute boy who sat in the second seat in the third row closest to the door to kiss her. On the cheek. Just once. And she wanted a brown horse like the one she gave carrots to on the way to school every morning and kissed on the muzzle every afternoon on the way home. But she wanted it to be a girl horse with spots on her rear like a blanket. Or maybe with black spots and a blue eye. Or maybe just a black one. If she had a black boy horse, she would be the happiest girl in the world.
Heather begged her mom for a week straight twice a year, the week before her birthday and the week before Christmas ever since she could remember, which was all of her life, or maybe just since she was six. On her eighth Christmas, when she was just starting to read pretty well, Santa brought her a Black Beauty story book and matching coloring book. That was good enough for Heather until the day before school got out for the summer. Summer started exactly one week before her birthday.
On her ninth Christmas, Santa brought her a My Little Pony. And on her tenth Christmas, her Mom bought her a stuffed palomino.
Once Heather started sixth grade, which meant junior high, a lot of things changed for her. She began taking showers instead of baths and her Mom let her wear a little face powder and skirts instead of jumpers and ponytail braids. She started to squeal with delight when boys would tug on her hair instead of throwing pencils at them. Heather was especially glad when James Duncan would throw pebbles at her during recess. He was the cutest boy in the class--according to Heather, of course. She would think of him and twirl her hair around her finger on her way home, but she always stopped to kiss the brown horse’s muzzle. In her mind, that would never change.
Heather grew older, but her love for horses never lessened, much to her parents’ dismay. All she ever talked about was horses and boys and horses. For her fifteenth birthday, she got two Bryer horses, which just thrilled her to the bone. On her sixteenth birthday, she asked for an old pickup truck, but her parents gave her grandma’s old Buick. Heather put license plates saying "hrsegrl" on it anyway.
One day after school at the beginning of her junior year in high school, she saw that her brown horse wasn’t in his pasture anymore. Heather hopped out of her car and jumped the fence looking for him, but he was no where to be found. An old man came out of the shadows and came towards her.
"I’m sorry, Heather. I know he was your favorite horse, but he was old."
Heather knew where he was going with this conversation. Her eyes began to fill and she stared at him with the doe eyes of an almost-woman. The run back to the fence and her car was all a blur. Just before she closed the car door, she heard the old man yell from across the pasture, "He colicked this morning."
She did her best to not think about horses for a long time. She even tried to avoid passing that pasture on the way to school. It was too hard to think about her poor horse dying in pain.
Heather did her best in school, which became her new pasttime. She graduated from high school with honors and went to the State University three hours away from home. She took a few riding lessons from her college friend with the extra money she earned at her part time job. The spark was within her still, but she refused to let it flame up for fear of being hurt again.
After college, her life took another turn. Heather married James Duncan, the same boy who used to throw stones at her in junior high. He had a good job at a big investment company in a nearby city while she stayed at home and wrote stories for magazines while raising two daughters. It has been scientifically proven by unknown scientists in far-off countries that horse craziness is genetically dominant in females. To Heather’s dismay, this theory was proven right.
When Heather’s first daughter, June, was almost eight, she found her mother’s book of Black Beauty in the attic. From that day on, June wanted nothing more than a horse. Heather told her daughter how much time and responsibility a horse was, but flashes of her childhood returned to her, along with flashes of her brown horse. That year at the county fair, Heather took her daughters, eight and five, to see the draft horses. Both daughters were in love, and Heather’s spark had finally burst back into flame.
Weeks passed and it was time for Heather’s thiry-third birthday. Each little girl drew a picture of a little girl and a grown up lady on a horse. Her husband blindfolded her and led her to the new pickup truck that she had wanted since high school parked out in front of the house, donning new "hrsewmn" license plates. He let her take a test drive alone. While at a stop light, she found a map drawn in crayon in the glove box. She followed it for twenty miles back to the pasture by her old house. On the fence was a drawing of a woman on a black horse’s back.
Out of the shadows trotted a beautiful black mare with ribbons in her mane and tail, and showing signs of a graceful, yet late, pregnancy. A dust cloud down the road neared her with a man driving a car and two screaming girls. "Isn’t she pretty, Mommy?" "I picked her out!" "No, I did!" "No, I did!!!" Then James spoke up,
"Actually I did. She’s kinda fat, but she’s really pretty and she’s nice. I thought you’d like her."
Heather kissed him on the cheek with overflowing eyes, and smiled,
"You goose, she’s pregnant."
Within a month, Heather’s dream had come true as well as her daughters’, who had a black foal to play with. Now she had kissed that cute boy and had her horse. It was just twenty-one years later than she expected.
The story Heather’s Horses is Copyright 1998 by Meghan Sapp.
The collection of works called Fish Eggs For The Soul is Copyright 1998 by Brian Rickman.
Copy edited by Sara Fawbush, editor of The Young Writer's Collection.