Poor Mare
White jaw bone hanging slack until the boy beneath the sheet pulls on the wire, making it clack clack clack. The adults laugh and cheer, children scream with delicious terror, some little ones have not developed a taste for terror. It is sour on their small pink tongues and they press tear-streaked faces into denim clad legs. The Mari Lwyd struts and jerks along the winter-dark street, the boys growing wilder with each drink, raucous, ribald comments thrown between them like grenades.
Her empty eye sockets swivel towards me and I feel seen. We are both poor mares I think, dead behind the eyes. We stand looking at each other for long minutes, until the ghost of the horse she was shimmers around the bleach boiled bones of her, weaves through the legs of the boys who control her. The crowd noise fades into an old night, a blood red moon, stars in unnamed patterns. I see her moving across the hill side, mane streaming behind her past long dead trees, hooves beating out a heartbeat on the earth.
After the wild evening, the Mari Lwyd is buried deep in the earth until next year, behind the barn and the boiling vat that stripped the flesh from her bones. As a wolf-grey twilight bites and fluttering rags of rooks return to the skeleton trees around the village, I slip into the barn, leave with a bundle wrapped in rags and dirt-caked hands.
I stroke her smooth bone skull, gild it with gold leaf. I stick seed pearls from my grandmother's broken necklace across her brow. Whisper into the hollow shell of her ear that she is a queen. The whisper echoes through the spaces and voids of her skull, coming back to me amplified and sibilant, “a queen, a queen, a queen.”
She lives in my orchard now. When I visit her on October evenings, when the wind has a different scent, when it is warm and damp with ending, I bring her apples and pour out cider onto the grass between us. Wild bees have made a hive of her beautiful skull, and amber tears of honey drip from her eyes.
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About the author
n Arnold is a child psychotherapist and author. She came to writing later in life but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience. She was born and grew up in the Black Country, but now lives in the Worcestershire countryside, and her stories are influenced by both the sooty glory of the industrial midlands and the wild magic of the English countryside, but most of all by lives lived at the edges and in between.
Her work has been published widely in a number of literary magazines but this is her first collection.
4. Blurb for back cover
Stories that shine like tiny jewels and provide a glimpse of the magic that can be found in the ordinary and the unseen , stories that act like a shard of stained glass, letting us see the world in unexpected ways.
Some stories are prize winners and have been printed in other places, but many are appearing in print for the first time in this collection, under 500 words, but containing whole lives or sinking deep into a single moment, they are all an invitation to look for the magic in the everyday, Karen Arnold’s stories are an invitation to notice that things are not always only what they seem to be. As the title story in Horse Dreams tells us, “there are no white horses, they are all grey”.
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