Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
Time and again, she finds her.
It’s brief and fleeting – all too fleeting – but none of it changes the fact the mare comes into her life again and again, bringing with her a scent of earth. Bringing with her a fluttering in Hickory’s chest, a feeling she dares not put a name to.
Her line is not meant for love stories – she knows this, the way she knows their names. They are meant to live brief starburst lives. And she has defied that – she’s made no waves, done so little of note (except for when she faced Death, faced Famine, consumed her own flesh just to spit it in their faces). And she’s aged. She is the first to know grey hairs, to know the particular aching of joints on cold mornings.
She could be the first in other things, too.
A thing she dare not name.
The mare says her name and she feels the mare’s tone in a way she has felt nothing before. She shivers, as if a goose had walked over her grave.
“I didn’t--” she begins, but it’s a sentence with no end, because what could she say? I didn’t think I’d see you again. I didn’t know you were still alive.
She swallows. She inhales. There’s that scent again, the one she has thought of on quiet nights.
“It’s good to see you again,” is what she says instead, and it is. She moves closer, and brushes her muzzle over the dark pelt of the mare, and that motion – so simple – ignites more things inside her. All those things she doesn’t name.
