SHEILA THORNE
The Horses Two little towheaded boys marched into the tall grass and weeds. A man wearing military fatigues followed close behind. “Drop down! Take cover!” he shouted, and they disappeared out of sight. The grass shook. Snorting, chortling noises sounding like laughter surfaced as the man stood there shouting orders. I was spending a lot of time looking out the window. I’d seen the boys outside in the tall grass before, playing hide-and-seek and makebelieve games. They’d moved in a few weeks earlier, in the middle of the school year. Sometimes they fought with each other, rolling around in the dirt, wrestling and punching and screaming at each other, “Butthead! Butthead!” I’d only seen the man once or twice. The house they’d moved into, weatherworn, in need of a new roof, had once been a barn. It was part of a compound of old farm buildings where I rented a converted trailer with peeling yellow paint. Our landlady lived in a bungalow that stood under a large live oak with one broken limb and another propped up with scaffolding. A third renter, a tall, skinny man who wore a repairman’s uniform and drove an old pickup, lived behind the landlady’s house in an unpainted shack, the kind meant for tools. Our houses ranged along a rutted looping dirt driveway with a gate to the main road. Tall grass and weeds grew along the side. The house where the boys lived was the farthest from the gate, near a fenced-off sheep paddock and a smaller goat enclosure. Beyond the sheep paddock a horse pasture dipped into a swale. The horses galloped back and forth or just stood around. No one ever approached them or rode them. In the winter rains, the swale filled partly with water so the horses had to huddle on the uphill side, and now, with spring, frogs appeared everywhere—in the grass, on leaves, their chirps pulsing steadily through the night. Scattered in various places around the property were fruit trees, rose and rhododendron bushes, flower beds and tiny vegetable plots, 6 | Raleigh Review
