Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches writing and edits horse less press. She is the author of one book of poetry, The End Of Rude Handles (Red Morning Press). Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Kulture Vulture, Diagram, Typo, The Cultural Society, CutBank, jubilat, No Tell Motel, Octopus and H_NGM_N. Visit her web to track her recent collaboration-in-progress with Erika Howsare.

I. “A Threat”

The week my friend died it felt like there were horses everywhere, far many more horses than usual. I was walking to the library early one morning when I passed a funeral in progress. It was not my friend’s – there were lots of funerals then.

Two live horses were standing stock-still, as they say, on the front lawn of the building, policemen atop them unblinking like memorials. During the rest of my walk I counted three actual statues of horses: one missing a hoof, one with a wreath of plastic flowers around its neck, one unnaturally muscular, all perfectly immoveable. So perfectly concrete that, at that time, I could have done anything I wanted in the whole world.

I could have laughed into their long faces, I could have jumped up on their backs and pretended to ride. But I did not laugh, I didn’t jump. My friend had just died. I was on my way to the library to find books with his signature still in them. My friend read alot of books and was simply angry in alot of ways; seeing his signature didn’t give me any comfort. It was easy to locate the books he had read but difficult to find one that interested me, and I felt embarrassed and angry for going to the trouble of taking them off the shelves.

I think I did bring something home with me but I don’t remember reading it. I remember sitting up in bed with Charley, making bets on which of the faucets in our house was dripping audibly. We were sitting stock-still, listening when a shadow fell over everything, a horse was passing outside our window, there was no question about it. Our window blinds were closed but we saw the shadow of a mountainous horse head and muscular neck.

I have never noticed that any of our neighbors own horses, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t or don’t. The fences of our neighbors are all much nicer and higher than ours, made of wood that looks like it would smell good if you pressed your face against it.

Charley left our bedroom and then came back, confirmed that it was the kitchen sink dripping and I dug under the mattress to give him his five bucks. The horse was still there, we didn’t open the blinds to acknowledge or give it some fruit, although we had both noticed after dinner that the apples on the kitchen table were getting soft.  

I am not at all familiar or comfortable with live horses, but I know, like everyone knows, that you have to feed them with your hand held flat if you don’t want to lose a finger. Charley said, “he is probably waiting to slip his big, heavy head under our sheets while we sleep,” and I could not think of any reason why not.  

II. “How To Bomb-Proof A Horse”

Indestructibility is equal parts nature and nurture. Blue-faced babies who did not laugh or cry at birth but eventually, simply, breathed are at an advantage; they have already lived through something. You have also proven something, that you were willing to go this far in order to protect us. I’ll have to admit I would have been sitting in the lobby with a surgical mask in my hand by now.

A real-life experience is not something, by definition, that you can reproduce for anyone, not even a baby. Some people videotape. People in groups often chant things that don’t always make sense, they learn from the internet how to make explosives and documentaries. They spill out into the street.

A baby, by contrast, can’t even blink. A baby is just present. It holds you aloft, above the mob or crowd, your baby is meant to hover motionless like a war memorial or a child playing statue at dusk, to be like a tree, stock-still. If you need help navigating yourself through the crowd a baby can change slightly, in order to high step through the other people, the people who make the crowd. A baby is meant to dance through the mob like an angel, without crying out, without trampling a toe or blinking an eyelash.

You have to remember, when visiting your old stomping grounds, that to your baby it is almost always like seeing everything for the very first time. Don’t expect them to laugh at your inside jokes. It is hard enough just being out there again.

You can practice some things with your baby without leaving home. Don’t pick them up if they cry. Keep your hand flat when you feed them if you don’t want, in the long run, to be losers.

Missing a meal can make a baby melancholy and distrustful of you. Ideally your baby will be adept at foraging and grazing, but not so driven that it will turn away from you, even if it means a serious sacrifice, a premature hole in your heart. Feeding your baby foreign foods is your prerogative, but results are unpredictable. A baby can develop allegiances you never would have imagined and stop coming home at night, when you need it the most. 

Know your enemy. Most babies, I promise you, can detect deceit and are afraid of beards. Use this to your advantage; always go unto your baby as if you are a child again.

I have watched a baby going bad, overzealous: for example the rotten little fishhead who broke the skin of my bicep in kindergarten because I didn’t memorize the verse from Revelations that we were assigned. If your baby ever tears into anyone it is really over. They will never work in this town again, and you will stop sleeping out of worry. A baby that agitates has no chance in life. You won’t, but you might as well, carve out his or her heart and leave it out in the garden for the birds to decipher.

The consequence of a bomb-proof baby is that their eyes will never color, their hair will never darken, their face will never change. They’ll take down telephone messages but they won’t be able to tell you what tone of voice I was using, if it sounded urgent. If you’re screaming bloody murder from the other side of the bathroom door they won’t ask you what’s the matter, won’t even think of breaking that door down. If you find yourselves standing at opposite ends of a dusky field or meadow one evening and you have a shiny apple in your hand, they will recognize your incandescent, hearth-like redness, even at that distance, and they will continue to stand their ground.

III. “Women and Children”

It was the middle of a business day when we decided to go to War. All of the more eligible soldiers had already gone before us and gotten killed and gone before us and gotten killed and gone before us and gotten killed, in waves and waves of them, and now there wasn’t a single young person on the street and it was our turn. So we asked someone else to watch all our telephones and we left the office and went straight home to change our socks and shoes. We rolled our sleeves up to the point where they are comfortable. We tucked our ties into our shirts to keep them away from what we imagined would be alot of machinery, the machinery of War. We looked everywhere for our spouses and children and could not find them, so we left messages on all of their beepers and we sat down to look at the maps.

The only maps we had were the maps of home. According to the maps the United States is divided into two unequal pieces by the Mississippi River. We filled those pieces with radio stations. We wrote long lists of all the call letters to all the radio stations we could remember and located all those stations on the map, the Ks and the Ws, divided cleanly, we talked about reminding each other to give each radio station notice of us as we passed. We worried over the words. We worried, again, about our spouses and children and checked our messages. We had no messages, so we drew little red vee’s across the Mississippi River to signify bridges that we could use to cross. We decided to call our spouses and children women and children, even though it wasn’t entirely accurate, even though some of us were women and some of them were men. We decided right then and there to use the language of War.

We weren’t sure of the accuracy of the bridges we’d drawn. We would have to rely on the machinery of War to tell us whether the bridges were there and, if they were not, to help us find new ways to cross the Mississippi and enter whatever territory we had to be entering which was necessary in order to honorably fight.

We were definitely, honorably fighting about this. We took a few minutes to think about the machinery of War and its conveyance. We admitted we had all dreamed about elephants once. In the bottoms of our hearts, in our free time, between answering telephones, we had all once sat at our desks doodling giant elephants with great big chains around their great big tusks, heaving along the machinery of War.

We were both like and unlike those elephants. We had, in the language of War, gotten very old. We were barely useful anymore, and we had buried plenty of bones, had walked across the country to reclaim and remember plenty and plenty of bones of the waves of more eligible soldiers who went to War before us, of some of our women and children who went to War before us or else got shot to death some other way, some death that was adjacent to War.

We called our women and children again and we did not know where they were, and we panicked which is very uncharacteristic of us, but we were experiencing the sentimentality of War. We drew our bridges in darker ink, in some cases we bore down so hard we tore the maps straight through the Mississippi, and we imagined that the holes in the paper were our women and children stalled on the bridges of our own making, their little cars broken down, their hands waving help out over the water, their telephone batteries all dead because we did not remind them to recharge them the night previous, all dead because where the river is the widest it is still too shallow for our big boats of War to be of any use and our vehicles of War would just burn those bridges down, but we did not burn those bridges down, we sent in helicopters of our own design with special hatches where we could lie on our bellies and hang down our arms out of the helicopters of War to grab them, and if our arms were not long enough we would sit up from the special hatches for a moment and remove our belts from our own pants and wrap one end around our own wrists and drop the other down to our women and children whose fingers would fit through the buckle holes and they would hold on and we would pull them up through the hatch of our own making and into safety just as the mystery of War prepared to turn the whole Mississippi into fiery slush and mayhem.  

That is what we decided would happen. We practiced folding and unfolding our maps once or twice, we put our folded maps in our back pockets and decided to go to Starbucks for lunch. 

We went to Starbucks for lunch and there were all our women and children, having lunch without us, totally surprised to see us, wholly unprepared to acknowledge our sudden understanding of the significance of War. We told them not to cry and they said of course they would not. We told them to keep on eating and they laughed at us in our faces, our faces newly painted in the camouflage war-paint of War, with speckles of fiery slush and mayhem and metal splinters from the special hatch still burning on our eyelashes. We took our maps out of our pockets and unfolded them like professionals and showed our women and children what a harsh, dangerous world it could be, how the whole country had looked before bridges were built and radio stations identified by the machinery of War, the Great Big Understander of Space.

Our women and children would not look at our maps, they said a parade was coming, if it did not rain, a parade celebrating the victories of War. Everyone who came back from the War was going to walk in the parade, or crawl in the parade, or ride in the parade, whatever they could do. Some women and children would carry the bodies of the soldiers who returned from the War completely dead but nonetheless returned, intact, which is more than other people got. Our women and children would not be carrying anything because we had not yet gone away, into War. Our women and children, adjacent to the women and children of War, held balloons and pinwheels in anticipation, even though the sky was cloudy, even though they would not look at what was happening on our maps, the mayhem come of a bit of bridge-building gone awry, and laughed at us some when we coughed and prayed over that, our women and children were itching to celebrate the passing bodies of the victories of War.

We sat with our women and children and celebrated the passing bodies of the victories of War amongst miles and miles of horses. Horses carrying one-legged soldiers, horses carrying war-time presidents and their autographed pictures, horses dragging wagons full of dead and gone soldiers behind them, horses riding other horses for the women and children’s pleasure, horses with policemen atop them moving back and forth through the crowd, watching for trouble.

Some horses trotting bareback for the other horses’ benefit. These animals were not much like the elephants we had been imagining; some of the horses, if you looked close, seemed to be displeased by the machinery of War. Some of them held their heads that way. All of  the horses were skittish around the dead soldier wagons in ways no one had anticipated, they bucked and galloped, they did not want to get too near, these horses seemed to smell blood everywhere. We had previously seen these horses in all the historical paintings and center-stage during political ralleys, but never in real life, never like this. Right then and there we doubted that these horses would ever get on the plane with us, the big cargo plane of War, to War, anytime soon. These horses would have to be satisfied being symbols of War. We would leave bucking, frothing symbols of War for our women and children to pat on and praise and if they trampled our women and children while we were away we would have no trouble at all putting them down, because they were not the real thing.

In the meantime, lunch was getting cold, and we still had to go to War, we still needed something to ride off on. Our women and children said we could take the family car, because our women and children don’t drive that much but they like to ride along – in fact, they suggested, if we weren’t going to be too long they could ride along with us, to War, and listen to the radio and play cards until we got back.

We told them they had obviously misunderstood the actuality of War and showed them our mayhem maps and concealed neckties and rough drawings of gigantic, tusky elephants as evidence. I said to my wife, “I have built special hatches for you!” And to my children, “You are getting bigger by the minute.” And they looked at me as if I spoke another language to them, and then my wife called shotgun, and my children piled in back, and when the parade finally ended and they were all buckled in we crossed the street and headed out of town, toward the Mississippi with the radio on.

© Jen Tynes 2006.

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