What a peculiar thing it is staring back at her.
Perhaps she had forgotten, just for a moment, that she was no longer dead.
Perhaps she had forgotten that horses are not meant to breathe underwater.
The thrashing had not been lost on her but it did not interest her enough to investigate. She is not altogether unfamiliar with horses that feast on the flesh of other horses. If memory served her correctly – which it almost never did – her mother had been a cannibal. It does nothing to incite fear and, for a moment, she merely stares at him, her expression passive.
“I hadn’t noticed,” she says, dry, the head tilted just so. She does not retreat from the river’s edge as he emerges from the water, dripping in the same way she had, to allow him room there on the bank. She does not cower or grimace despite the way he towers over her. Instead, she tips back her head to peer curiously back at him.
“What are you?” she asks without pretense. There is no sense of wonder in her tone. She does not grin or bat her lashes, merely studies him for anything that might suggest why he is able to breathe underwater. Can she breathe underwater?
Without regard for her companion, she plunges back into the river. She does not bother with pulling in a lung-filling breath before she dips her head under the water’s raging surface and drags in a breath. But it is not a breath at all and her lungs are not equipped for filtering the oxygen out of water and she immediately surfaces. Her lungs spasm as she drags herself out of the water and coughs violently.
and the nightmares that accompany it
