B ecause the cookie store was only three minutes from my house, and it smelled like heaven. Because the cookies were still warm and the soft, doughy middles and the melted chocolate chips tasted like heaven. Because I didn’t eat them all at once (because my heart might not take that). Because I ate just a tiny piece and saved the rest for later. Because there would be more tears later. Because my horse died that day, and I didn’t see it coming. Because he was given a clean bill of health just two days before. Because that morning he ate all his hay and his timothy pellets with gusto. Because I turned him loose in the round pen and asked him to move in circles around me. Because he was nineteen years old, and he knew the drill. Because his lips were closed tight, his head up like a sail, and he covered the ground with his hovering strides. Because he was strong and beautiful like that. Because the morning was cool and the movement was easy. Because no alarm went off to tell us to stop. Because he hit the side panel and one back leg curled up, and I thought it was broken. Because he fell to the ground and all four legs went limp. Because he was shaking, and I sat by his head and stroked his soft cheek and told him what a good boy he was while he breathed his last breath. Because he’d carried me safely for seventeen years. Because the cowbirds rose from their roost on the rails and circled and spiraled above where he lay. Because I was numb when the woman arrived with a trailer and winches to pick up his body. Because she looked at his handsome fit frame and said, “This isn’t right.” Because she took him away and I don’t know where and I don’t care because it wasn’t him anymore. Because his pen is now empty in a row of pens holding horses. Because my heart now has an emptiness I don’t know how to fill.
I’ve been searching all day for a little piece of heaven.
Because all good horses go to heaven, don’t they?
Author's Comment
The world, with all its splendor and all its heartbreak, gives writers an endless mishmash of material to dig into and pass from hand to hand until some essence is left that inspires words to flow. With my writing, I strive to create little pieces of beauty with words. In this case, the use of anaphora helped me access and process difficult emotions in real time.
The Angle of Falling Light
by Beverly Gologorsky
Set during the 'forever wars' that followed 9/11, The Angle of Falling Light movingly explores the demons that survivors must wrestle with in the wake of tragedy. Beverly Gologorsky brings us a great cast of characters, at their center three working-class women trying to shape lives of their own in a world that seems to promise them nothing but deadening repetition.
Brave and faltering, they face daunting conundrums of love, care, and the pull of freedom. How do we live past the terrible knowledge that we cannot always help those we cherish the most? Are we still entitled to seek happiness? Knowing how easily disaster can strike the vulnerable, how do we dare to take the risks required for a satisfying life? Is such a thing even possible in a society hooked on war, dangerous drugs, and hatred of the 'other’?
Alongside the unforgettable trio of Nina and her two daughters (the beautiful but heedless Marla and shy, determined Tessa—barely an adult, but forced to pick up the pieces when her home life shatters), we also spend time with Rhonda, an 80-something artist whose struggle to stay independent in the face of physical limitations and family pressure complements Tessa’s quest to become a photographer.
Gologorsky’s unsparing vision of the bleakness so rampant in a nation addicted to combat and inequality only renders more compelling her portraits of these women bound and determined to make a way from no ways.
Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.
Paula Brown is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in the Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Anthology Nature, Wising Up Press Adult Children Anthology, Adirondack Review, Whitefish Review, South Dakota Magazine, and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. She lives in Tucson with her husband and a pack of dachshunds.