Horse Girls

by Timmy Reed

Joel Timothy

“This obsession with donkeys has got to stop,” my mother told me. I lowered my head and looked at the dirt. There were little plastic mule faces on my shoelaces, clamping them shut because they were always coming untied. The mules had long floppy ears and were supposed to look stubborn, but to me they looked sad.

She was probably right, I realized.

We had been at the park for hours and I had been talking near constantly since we left the house, never once letting her change the subject. I talked too much when I got excited and then I realized it and I felt bad. When I was alone with my mother and the other kids weren’t around to make fun of me, I tended to open up and let it all out. I couldn’t help myself.

“Let me just show you one more picture,” I said and held my book in front of her.

The book was called The Definitive Donkey: A Textbook on the Modern Ass and was just one of a whole stack of books on the subject—some owned, some borrowed from the library—that sat piled next to my bed at home. Some of the books were for kids, but this one wasn’t. This one was just for anyone who wanted to know a lot about donkeys. I already knew a ton, but I always wanted to know more.

I had loved donkeys for three and a half months. There was a group of girls in my class that the boys all called the Horse Girls. They were all girls that rode horses. They were all really rich because you have to be rich to ride a horse. Even a donkey was pretty expensive. I learned it in my book. Too expensive for us to have, my mom said. I would’ve liked to have had a donkey though. I would let it roam around and do whatever it wanted. I would let it sleep in my bed. The Definitive Donkey didn’t say this was a good idea but I was sure my donkey and I would have been best friends, if we could’ve only afforded her.

I even sometimes thought of myself as a donkey—I had big ears and my hair was about the color of a donkey’s; brown-grey—and I thought of the other, prettier girls as horses. But there is nothing wrong with being a donkey, I told myself. Donkeys carried important people. Jesus was the only one I could think of. Probably some of the saints too, I guessed.

The boys in my class definitely preferred horses to donkeys. Everybody liked horses better, except me. I wondered why donkeys were so expensive. You would think people would just be giving them away. But then I remembered how much they eat. You have to feed a donkey and give it a farmyard to live in. We didn’t even have a garage.

I liked to eat a lot too, which was another way I was like a donkey. I ate when I got nervous. I liked sweets but I could eat anything if I was nervous enough. Sometimes I balled up pieces of white bread like little pills and fed them to myself in front of the TV when I got home from school. I could hear other children playing in the street outside. I ate faster. I always felt bad about eating when I was nervous. I also felt bad about biting my nails.

It was not that I was very fat, but my mother still told me not to eat when I was nervous because when I got older my metabolism would slow down and I would be fat and get diabetes. I didn’t know if that was true but if it were, it would be another thing I had in common with donkeys since they have a slower metabolic rate than horses and need to watch their intake of protein and carbohydrates.

I told you I knew a lot about donkeys.

There are other differences too, like donkeys are more independent thinkers than horses and stronger for their size. They also do not startle as easily. Horses are herd animals that live in big groups. Donkeys are buddy animals that usually pair off in two’s to socialize. They develop strong emotional bonds like friendship. I hadn’t found my buddy yet.

If a male donkey and a female horse make a baby it is called a mule and the mule is sterile and can’t make babies. I didn’t know my father but I kind of suspected my mother was always more of a horse than a donkey. I figured my father must have been a total donkey. I could be a kind of mule, I thought, but always more donkey than horse.

If a female donkey and a male horse make a baby, the baby is called a hinny. I wasn’t a hinny though, because my mother was such a horse.

The school’s campus was much worse than a barnyard, I think. Humans are capable of doing the meanest things and children are forgiven for abusing that ability because they don’t know any better. Adults too, but I didn’t know that yet. I probably would have been as bad as the rest of them if I had anyone to look down on, but I didn’t. I was at the bottom of the class in almost every way. The only thing I was a lot better than them at was talking about donkeys. And I had only been doing that for three and a half months!

Before that, it had been horses—very briefly, which had been what led me to discover donkeys when I realized becoming a Horse Girl would always be impossible for me. Before that I had wanted to learn ballet, so my mother took me around to each studio in town where I would attend the first free lesson each of them offered with sign-up, which all of them offered, until we had run out of studios. My mom suggested I make a friend at each studio to take me back there so I could do another round of lessons because the lessons were also free if you were a one-time guest. It was embarrassing to only go out for the free lessons. I would have loved to go to a second one. I just didn’t know how to make any friends who would invite me as a guest. I didn’t know how to dance either. At one place, I fell into a mirror and hurt my head and started crying because everyone was looking at me. Before ballet, it had been collecting rocks in the yard and out front by the street. I still had a whole shoebox full of rocks. The rocks made me feel stupid when I looked at them. They were mostly all just brown or grey or white. The only colorful ones were actually pieces of broken glass. Some things I had thought were rocks and collected proudly turned out to be just dirt rocks and crumbled in the bottom of the box. I kept the box under my bed now, ashamed, but I still kept them. I would have felt guilty, for some reason, if I had thrown them away. It was like I owed the rocks something. Even the dirt.

I liked to wear masks to school on Halloween. My mother said I had a nice face—a little round, but I would grow into it—but I liked hiding it from people when I could and Halloween was always a great chance to do this. I became a little more confident behind my costume. I could be a part of all the games and candy and the Costume Parade around the gym.

Usually I hated being in the gym. I felt like I was on a stage in front of everyone, but that was okay if I had a mask on and everyone else was dressed up too. This year I was planning to go as a donkey, naturally. I would have liked to go as one part of a two-person donkey costume and I would have even been the donkey’s tail, but a two-person anything wasn’t much of an option for me.

The Horse Girls were all either blonde or tall or very, very pretty, or all three at once. I was a runt. They had their initials on their sweaters and backpacks. My backpack was still this dopey thing with cartoons on it. My mom said I could get a new pack next fall. She had bought me this one over the summer, when I still thought everyone would be into cartoons, but I came back to school in September and I was the only one with a cartoon backpack. My mother had even gotten me a matching plastic lunch box. All the Horse Girls bought their lunch in the cafeteria. Even the kids who didn’t buy lunch everyday had switched to paper bags.

“I’m serious,” my mom said. “If not for my sanity, then for your own good. What do the other kids talk about, honey? I am sure they don’t talk about donkeys all day.”

I looked down at the stalk of grass I was tearing apart with my fingers. I had eaten some grass a little bit earlier. “Some of them talk about horses,” I said through my lip.

“Ugh. Well, talk about horses I guess then. Mix it up a little,” my mom said. “But I’d spread your interests out a little farther than just horses and donkeys,” she added.

“But I love donkeys.”

“I know you do. I don’t have anything against donkeys. It’s just that it is okay to have other interests too. You don’t always have to go get so wrapped up in just one thing. Spread yourself around some.”

She lit a cigarette and breathed.

“Can I still be a donkey for Halloween?”

My mother sank a little inside her sweatshirt. She looked at me and then at her lap. “You can be whatever you want to be, baby. There is no stopping you.”

We could both hear children’s voices bouncing around the trees deeper in the park. They sounded like birds, calling to each other. I think my mother wished I could be a bird too.

One day a girl came and sat next to me at lunch as I flipped through one of my books, running my fingers along the animals’ bristly manes. I had never seen her before and she looked older than me. I thought it was a trap.

“Is it okay if I sit here?” she asked.

I told her it was a free country. I had learned to be a little defensive when I was around other kids. You had to be cautious or you could get hurt.

She sat down quietly and opened up a small Tupperware container with a neat little sandwich, a cookie, and a few sliced carrots inside. She was wearing a cardigan that looked like one my grandmother wore before she passed away.

“I like your sweater,” I said.

I wanted to ask her if she liked donkeys but I was too shy.

Her cheeks were red but they did not look red from embarrassment, they looked like they were always that way. I wanted to ask her if there was something wrong with her face but I caught myself. I knew better than that.

“Why did you sit next to me?” I asked.

She held her sandwich halfway to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can get up.” She started to stand up. I grabbed her elbow, maybe a little too hard.

“No! Don’t get up!” I waved my hand over the part of the cafeteria bench she had been sitting on, like it was something really special. We both sat back down.

“I was just surprised is all,” I said, nervous. “Did you know donkeys like to live mostly in pairs? They are buddy animals.”

I showed her my book.

She said she liked it.

I told my mom I had met a new friend at school today and that she was a “cool older girl with really rosy cheeks.” I think my mother thought I was making her up. “Her name is Ashley,” I told her. This made my mother even more skeptical because she knew Ashley was my favorite name for stuffed animals and imaginary pets. It was just a coincidence though. I had mostly stopped playing with those things but my mother just hadn’t noticed yet.

“That’s nice,” my mom said. “Now don’t go around bragging about her to everyone at school, okay?”

She didn’t want me to embarrass myself. I didn’t bother to argue with her. I knew Ashley was real.

At school, I waited until lunchtime each day to sit with Ashley, who was in fact two grades older than me. She had recently moved to the state and didn’t particularly care about horses, but loved unicorns. I told her unicorns weren’t real and she said she already knew. Ashley was very polite. I worried that she would find a new friend her own age soon and then she would stop sitting with me at lunch. It was nice to have a friend to eat with.

She was good at pretending she was interested in everything I talked about, which was mostly donkeys at the moment. Maybe she really was interested. Once I even got up the courage to ask her if she liked me. I looked up from one of my books, where I had been running my fingers over the outline of one of the animal’s faces.

“Do you like me?” I asked.

She said, “Yes.”

I think my cheeks were as red as hers.

I looked for Ashley after school each day but I could never find her anywhere. I only ever saw her at lunch. She did not hang out in front of the school to wait for the busses or carpool like the rest of us and I never saw her heading down the drive with any of the kids who lived nearby and walked to school. I wasn’t in a carpool. I just got picked up at the bus stop by my mother after she got off work everyday. I had to wait a couple hours before she showed up usually and all the other kids had disappeared by then. Mom told me to do my homework during this time of the day. Lately I mostly just looked at pictures of donkeys instead.

I understood why my mother didn’t believe in Ashley because of the imaginary friends—not just pets—I had made up in the past. I used to pretend I had neighborhood friends I would go visit, but really I just hid behind a tree in our yard and picked at the bark. After awhile there was a bare patch on the tree where I always sat. For months I just scratched at it with my finger before I got bored of sitting back there and gave up pretending my friends were real. I knew my mother could tell I was lying about my friends because sometimes I peeked and I could see her in the window, watching the tree as if she could see me right through it.

During lunch, when I would sit down to eat and look at the donkeys in my books, which I had begun tracing and even drawing myself after hearing Ashley’s encouragement, my new friend would already be sitting there with her lunch, waiting for me. I had never been good at drawing anything before—not ballerinas, or houses, or flowers, or my family—and so it was exciting to find out someone thought I was good and should keep drawing. I was focusing on close-ups of the faces now, with big pretty eyes and donkey ears. I was very careful to make sure my donkeys never looked too much like horses. I wanted everybody who saw them, which was still only Ashley at this point, to know the difference.

The horse girls made fun of my donkey books. One of them, Camilla, told me she used to have a donkey on her family’s farm but it was old and her parents put it to sleep, which means they killed it. She laughed after she told me the story, like she knew it would hurt me, like the donkey had been one of my relatives. I felt bad for the poor animal. I did not like Camilla at all.

Who would ever like someone that uses a dead donkey to hurt people’s feelings?

All the other horse girls and everybody else in the school, apparently. Camilla was very popular.

Some of the kids in my class were saying that the costume parade was stupid now because we were older than we were last year. I think they were just trying to be cool. A lot of them were still talking about their costumes. And I couldn’t imagine that anybody had stopped liking candy. But some of the boys were saying that when you got older Halloween was supposed to be about pranks, not candy. I had never liked pranks very much because nobody had ever asked me to be on the winning side of one.

My homeroom teacher asked all the kids in class what they were planning to be for Halloween. I wanted to raise my hand but I didn’t. I would surprise them, I thought, with the best donkey costume ever. Another part of me already felt sick and wanted to skip the parade altogether.

It turns out my new friend Ashley wasn’t very excited about the parade either. I figured that was just because she was new in school and she didn’t know how fun it could be to get all dressed up in a neat mask so nobody looks at you like they do on normal days. I told her the costume parade was the best part of the school year.

“I guess,” she said and smiled at me. I think she was trying to be polite.

“Really, it is,” I told her. “We barely do any schoolwork all day and everybody is happy and people clap when you walk around the gym. It is like the one day a year when you can be anything you want,” I said.

“What are you going to be?”

“A donkey, of course!”

Ashley smiled and her cheeks grew even rosier.

“I’m sure you will look beautiful,” she said.

“What are you going as?” I asked.

“Oh, probably nobody,” Ashley said. “I’ll just be me.”

The Sunday before Halloween, I spent the afternoon drawing my mask. I did not ask my mother to help me. I used brown markers to draw the details of the donkey’s face, which I cut from brown construction paper that I shaped to give it long floppy ears. I used some old shoelaces, which had turned grey/brown, to make the donkey’s mane and I glued an eraser on the mouth so it looked like his tongue was hanging out. I spent the rest of the evening making a unicorn mask to give Ashley, who I was sure I would see in the gym for the Halloween costume parade because the entire school was always there. Ashley hadn’t asked me to make her one, but I felt bad that she wasn’t wearing a costume to the parade. I hoped we could be donkeys and unicorns together. Buddy animals.

I pictured us parading side-by-side, donkey and unicorn, around the gym.

With my recent drawing practice and all the information I had learned about donkey features, I was sure we would be a hit. Plus, I liked the idea of being seen parading with an older girl, even if she was new. I felt like I could be a new girl too. Like we could be new together.

I mean, we would have our masks on.

Halloween was on a Wednesday and Ashley had been absent from school, or at least from lunch, since I saw her on Friday. I hoped she was sick. It wasn’t that I wanted her to feel sick, I just didn’t want her to be avoiding me.

Then it was Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning, my mother tried to talk to me at breakfast. She did this every year on the morning of the Halloween parade because she knew how excited I got. My mom was always worried about me getting too excited about things. It was like she didn’t want the world to let me down. I loved her for worrying about me when I was alone but when we were together it was annoying.

I hadn’t even shown her my donkey mask yet, although she had asked me if she could help a lot of times, especially when she saw me drawing the unicorn. I think she thought the unicorn mask was for me and she liked that. Maybe my mother was more of a unicorn than a horse, I thought.

“Are you sure you even want to go today?” she asked me, smoking over the big bowl of cereal we were sharing. “I mean, you are not going to even have much class right? What are you going to learn? Why not stay home? I am only working a half-shift and we could have our own little parade this afternoon, right here in the living room. I could even pick up a costume after work.”

“It is not what I will learn, Mom,” I told her, strapping on my backpack as I spoke. “It is what they will learn.”

And then she took me to school for the day.

It was a chilly day and I was able to trace donkey faces on the windows of the car with my finger. I hoped mom would notice them before the car’s heater melted them off but she didn’t, or at least she never said anything.

I could feel the two masks I had made, donkey and unicorn, both of them hot on my back like a special, tiny bit of weight that coursed through the stuffing between my spine and my textbooks. It charged me up like a battery and made me smile as I walked into the building. I was ready to put on a mask. I wished I could even wear Ashley’s red, new face.

I went to school wearing a grey turtleneck and grey corduroy pants. No mask. The masks stayed in my bag. I could feel them like heat against my back. They were ready to come out. I had two tails in my pocket, one made of brown yarn and the other like a rainbow made from these friendship bracelets my mom had bought me each year since I could remember. I also had a white leotard leftover from my ballet phase, which I thought Ashley could wear as part of her costume. I was smiling to myself and I thought I looked smug to the other kids in school bus, but I didn’t care. It was all part of my plan to have the best costume, the best donkey for sure, that the gym ever saw. I realized they didn’t think donkeys were cool but I would show them. The other kids, dressed up in their own costumes, would just look at me as a donkey, next to Ashley as a unicorn, and it would be more than obvious that donkeys like me were cool, at least for Halloween.

For the record, I knew Ashley wasn’t necessarily “cool” yet in the eyes of the other students. I mean, she was still a new girl. Most kids probably hadn’t even noticed her yet. But she was older and she was not ashamed to be my friend and that was more than enough for me.

The parade was scheduled for immediately after lunch and, along with the other planned activities like bobbing for apples and drawing jack o’ lanterns and ghosts on construction paper, would take up the rest of the school day until dismissal. I planned to coax Ashley into wearing the mask last minute at lunch and then we could walk into the parade together, side-by-side, as if we were leading a chariot.

But when I sat down at my table, Ashley was not waiting for me. I worried that she had not come to school again, or worse, had made new friends and decided to sit at their table instead of mine. My eyes kept roving over the costumed faces in the lunchroom. I was still not wearing a mask, which a few of my teachers had commented on in surprise because they knew this was always my favorite day of the school year. In fact it was not only my favorite, it was the only day of the year I ever remembered enjoying myself at all. I wanted so badly to have a friend to share my day with. At least for one holiday. At most, for all of them.

I considered flushing myself down the toilet like a piece of horsemeat I found Zip-Locked in my lunchbox. It is not that mom and dad fed me horses, but I felt like the girls in school had. The Horse Girls weren’t even dressed up as horses! They were wearing their actual riding costumes that they used for horse shows and steeplechase events. Horses were everywhere at this point, shoved down my throat, and I was a fucking donkey. It wasn’t quite forced cannibalism because we were that different, but it still felt wrong.

I kept considering this idea until the bell rang and Ashley had not shown up at my lunch table. I kept a tiny piece of hope in my pocket. I prayed to myself that she might show up in the bleachers of the gym and save me while I paraded with the other masked children. We had all turned into beasts and ghouls, except for me. I had not put my mask on yet. Ashley had not appeared. I felt naked dressed in sweats, as myself on Halloween, and my friend was nowhere to be seen.

I slipped on my donkey mask and took Ashley’s unicorn mask in my hand and went to the gym. The hall outside the gym was empty and I could hear the Monster Mash coming from inside. I was the last one to enter. I got on all fours, to get the full donkey effect. It was impossible to crawl like that without crushing Ashley’s mask, so I wore that around my neck to keep it safe. I must’ve looked like I had two heads.

I prayed in the hallway.

I brayed quietly into my mask.

I began to squeeze through the doors, which were propped open with a wastebasket. I started to cry. I felt like I was crying donuts. I began to eat the donuts off the ground as I pushed the little trashcan onto the floor of the gym and slipped through heavy doors that closed on me and clamped shut on me, hurting my feet in their slippers. I brayed, like a donkey. I even sort of howled, like a wolf.

The crowd was dressed up like monsters and people from retro eras like the 1980’s or 1960’s. There were a lot of maids and other sexy-things. Several jocks were dressed up as girls to be funny. It was a little hard to see through the eyeholes of my mask. None of the monsters were scary and none of them looked real. Everyone looked like babies playing dress-up. I thought, for sure, that none of them cared about their costumes like I did. I was the real thing. I HEE-HAWED at the crowd. They laughed at me but I kept braying. I kicked my hind legs up in the air. They laughed more. I kicked my way around the gym. At some point, the unicorn mask fell off and got stuck to my feet. It kept dragging behind me, like a dead warrior’s face in a dirty town square. Hee-haw, I said. Hee-haw, I told them.

They laughed at me but I kept braying.

Hee-haw.

They laughed at me but I kept braying.

Hee-haw.

They laughed at me.

Fuck them all, I thought. Eff-Them.

Eff-them.

Hee-haw.

Fuck Imaginary Ashley, too.

Fuck her.

I thought that.

Really. I did.

Not fuck me for being so stupid, so crazy, such a dork, but fuck her.

All the way.

Hee-haw.

The lights were shining down on me and there was orange and black tissue everywhere in that gym and I just kept braying, mid-court, and they kept applauding. They kept applauding. They kept laughing at me and making donkey noises right back at me, but they were whistling and applauding too. I did not win anything, but the crowd applauded. I could have died right there, but I didn’t. I never even looked up to see how the Horse Girls were reacting. I knew they were reacting like everyone else: they were laughing and cheering in a mean, careless way, like bad teenagers standing around a dying donkey. But at least there was applause.

I went to see Ashley after the parade, unicorn face in hand. I sat at our spot in the cafeteria, which was empty because everyone had gone home or out Trick or Treating after the Halloween rally.

The vending machines made farting noises while I waited. I listened to them like they were voices. “People may have paid attention to you today but we are still your only friends,” they said. “And we did not even see the parade.”

I drank, like, four sodas while I waited and ate two bags of gummy bears. Animal crackers, too. Ashley never showed.

The next day at school was just like the one before the Halloween parade. Next days are always like that.

Something plain and shitty always happens after braying at the parade.

If you are lucky enough to have brayed at all.

---

Timmy Reed is a writer, teacher, and native of Baltimore, Maryland. He received his BA from College of Charleston, where he worked for the Crazyhorse literary journal, and his MFA from University of Baltimore. Timmy is the author of the books Tell God I Don’t Exist (Underrated Animals Press), The Ghosts That Surrounded Them (Dig That Book Co.), Miraculous Fauna (Underground Voices), Star Backwards (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), IRL(Outpost 19), and Kill Me Now (Counterpoint Press) as well as a few chapbooks: Stray/Pest (Bottlecap Press), Poem, A Chapbook (DW X) and Zeb And Bunny Build Russian Dolls (Hidden Clearing Books). His short fiction has appeared in many places including Necessary Fiction, Atticus Review, Curbside Splendor, as well as featured in the Wigleaf Top 50 on multiple occasions. In 2015, he won the Baker Artist Awards Semmes G. Walsh Award and was a finalist for the Baker Artist Awards in 2018. He teaches English at University of Baltimore and Community College of Baltimore County and English as a Second Language at Morgan State University. He is represented by Madison Smartt Bell at Pande Literary Agency. Learn more here: https://underratedanimals.wordpress.com