I walk out of the back door into a landscape of beauty and murder. No one uses their front doors here. Front doors go out to the stretch of lawn before the worn road. Back doors lead to driveways and barns and yards of green leading to fences and woods.
Even now I’m not really sure if this happened to me or if my mother told me this story so many times that I feel like I was there. My mother never tired of telling terrible stories about my father. My father never tired of doing horrible things that made perfect terrible stories for my mother to tell. Those were their jobs, and how I saw them. My father, a distant, cruel figure made of money and alcohol and sarcasm, who existed to torment others, especially my mother; my mother, a creature molded out of tears and grief and fresh-baked pies who existed for her children and her martyrdom and bad choices. They were both casted so well, especially in my blurry memories from my childhood. Movie of the week fodder – or maybe an HBO limited docuseries on dysfunctional marriages.
So I go out the back door into bright, nearly blinding sunlight. The sound of a gunshot had drawn me away from the Saturday mid-morning tv drivel – ahem, I mean classic cartoons. Rooby Roo my ass. I’m maybe 6? 8? I have no idea really.
Across the driveway is an enclosed yard, white fence and all, leading off to the actual pasture, the barn to the right. White with dark green trim of course, just like the house. Just for show. The gates of the yard are open, just decorative really, they don’t keep anything in or out. The first thing I see is one of our horses, on the ground, a pool of blood spreading under her large, greying head. Two men stand above her – my father and a man with a gun, someone I don’t recognize. My father looks up and spots me coming closer, and shouts angrily. My mother’s name, an accusation, hangs on the air. I am ushered inside.
I’m plagued by questions – Did this really happen? Did the horse see this coming? How did they get her body to the grave in the woods? If they didn’t, is that grave empty? (I want to dig it up…) Who the hell do you call to come and shoot your horse? And lastly – why would my father do that when I was home? With both my parents dead now, they can’t confirm or deny any of these things.
This dream – memory – story bears fruit. Nightmares, repeated, that have me waking with a scream. One especially vivid in which I feel that a horse is laying on me. I literally, physically feel it crushing me, suffocating me. Waking to find I’m truly only weighted down by my blankets, bunched across my middle. I’m only suffocated by memories. By stories. By dysfunction, and by being tethered to people who think they need to do bad, need to feel bad in order to be real.