Beyond the five-bar gate – on a gnat-speckled lane, between parallel steep Victorian streets – he kept his horses.
Someone had told her once that they called it the Greenway, though nobody else agreed, and the OS map had a different opinion. That summer, on the hottest day in June, she helped her two daughters over the gate – easy, smiling Beatrice, shadowed by furious, toddling Maud.
She was seeking relief from the heat. What she found, instead, was a boundary-place – a portal as distinct as the wardrobe that led to Aslan. On one side, the houses in rows, their sun-baked driveways and silent cars, the dead air inside them; on the other, a cool green sloping nave, where the sparrows worshipped at a frantic chitter and the insects filled the shade like snow.
Trees that could cope nowhere else on the island found a way to cling to life on the Greenway. Dusty hawthorns. Swaggering sycamores. Even a lone, brave apple tree that would have elsewhere shrivelled in the salt and wind. The man who owned these plots was known as Sherfer, and the family had seen him only once – an ancient figure in a woollen waistcoat, dragging behind him a child’s toy pull-cart, stacked with hay. His ponies lived halfway up the Greenway, in a paddock not much larger than a swimming pool. Their coats were shaggy, unbrushed. Titanic blocks of Portland limestone walled them in. In truth, the lane was a cramped, unsuitable place for horses – but Maudie and Beatrice fell under its instant spell. They christened the ponies, choosing one name each, and after that first trip insisted on visiting Moonlight and Good Neighbour every afternoon. The paddock gate was tall, so tall their mother had to lift the girls to see inside; her arms would tremble as she stretched, while the girls dropped their devotional offerings over the top as though they were dropping wishes.
Apple cores. Carrot ends. Trimmings retrieved from the prickly, woodlouse-squirming bag at the rear of the lawnmower. All went over the gate, while Maudie – who cowered at strangers, who rarely slept – began to dream the Greenway. She muttered the horses’ names into her pillow. She gripped her plastic farm horse even in the bath. When Good Neighbour, straining for a carrot, chomped the toddler’s thumb-pad by mistake, the girl who’d screamed in every supermarket she had ever entered bit her bottom lip, and let out not one sound. Her mother watched her closely all day, but she never whimpered – only clutched the bite-mark with a passionate devotion like one nursing her stigmata.
The girls made plans to camp under the trees – an all-night vigil, honouring their ferocious and shaggy gods. But their mother had seen the new estates springing up on the island; had seen the ancient Sherfer with his trembling hands and too-pale eyes, like the underparts of a snail. She, alone, was not surprised on the day when two men – one in paint-spattered workboots, one in a muscle-hugging suit – stood blocking their path to the Greenway.
The trees went first. The family endured the week-long buzz of saws, and then the further, horror-movie-sound of industrial drills boring holes in the stumps so the workbooted man might inject the poison. The gnats burned up in the new, fierce heat. The sparrows ceased their conversation. The last living creatures to depart the lane were Sherfer’s horses; too long-neglected to be bridled, they were simply dragged towards the road, with the ropes in hangman’s knots about their necks and their poor hooves curving up in front of them like clogs.
Moonlight entered the horsebox meekly. But Good Neighbour could not be so easily tricked. She tugged her ropes. She chomped at fingers. On the ramp, she reared like a cowboy’s horse, and had to be bodily shouldered inside.
Their mother cupped Beatrice’s head to her breast so she wouldn’t see. But Maudie sought no comfort. She stood sentinel near the five-bar gate, a screw of paper in one fist, her thumb-pad freshly bleeding. When the horsebox pulled away, she threw the paper at the taillights. But whatever prayer she had scrawled in blood, it went unheard. The horsebox dipped towards the causeway. Maudie stood with her back to the driveways and the sun-bright cars, and when the horsebox reached the mainland road she let out a sound her mother would never unhear – a rusty, creaking howl that sounded at first like a cub in a trap, and ever after like a green door closing.
Author: Angharad has been writing stories all her life, but she's always attempted novels; this is only her second attempt at writing Flash Fiction.
Passionate narrative, well-written, and appropriately so sad especially as I look toward the horse portrait that hangs near my desk.