Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I turned into a horse it was only from the waist down. I still had arms, then. But my bottom half was unmistakably horse: stippled silver and cream, smooth and glossy. When I was annoyed, my tail – a white-blonde, though I was dark as a pirate – flicked back and forth.
My husband saw what had happened. He looked over the top of his paper while I brewed the tea, circling the leaves in the fat pretty pot, and said: ‘a lady walks with a light step.’
Something his mother says, I’m sure of it.
It was true that my tread was heavier; when I walked down the corridor, the people downstairs hit the ceiling with brooms. There is a Japanese saying: a heavy step means a heavy heart. I do not know that this is true. I never liked my thighs, my calves, when they were slender and quiet. To be honest, I was sorry they came back.
The second time I turned into a horse, only my head remained human. Later that day, I was making dinner for my husband and his friends. They were playing dice around our kitchen table, smoking and throwing down two dollar and five dollar bills as if they were nothing.
‘You are clumsy,’ my husband said, as I tried to bring the food to the table using my teeth. ‘A woman should be graceful.’
The next day, when I woke up a woman, I waited until my husband had left for work and then made droppings in our garden. It seemed a more pleasant way of undertaking the task. Besides, by then I had become used to it. After I became a horse, I never had trouble loosening my bowels the way I once had. The aperture opened, shut, without effort or resistance.
The woman from downstairs came into the garden to put out her washing and saw me stand up.
‘This does not belong to me,’ I said, gesturing, but she turned back and hung the clean white sheets on her line, where they billowed like sails.
The last time I turned into a horse, it was the middle of the night. I woke and I felt a burning pain which began in my woman’s parts and radiated outwards. Ah yes, I thought. By then it was a familiar sensation. But suddenly, I was very cold. I shivered and my skin shirred and gooseflesh appeared and coarse horse’s hairs began sprouting.
I walked down the hallway to the mirror by the door and oh yes – there was the proof – I was all horse, from mane to fetlock to rump. I breathed hotly and loudly, and my nostrils vibrated and the fringe on the lampshade trembled.
I tried kicking my back legs, and even as the idea of a kick was forming in my mind my rear legs flew backwards and knocked a vase from the mantelpiece. It had been a gift from my mother-in-law. It shattered.
I should sweep that away, I thought. Only I couldn’t.
At that thought, a wave of happiness washed over me. I made my way to the kitchen, disturbing everything as I went. My tail swished – gone was our wedding picture. I shook my head. Down came a decorative clock. With my teeth I opened the cupboard door and found a bag of sugar and tore it open with my lips. I crunched it, spilling sugar everywhere, joyful in my big strong teeth, in the long plush tongue I had grown.
I could see out the kitchen window. The woman from downstairs was outside. She was becoming a peacock. Green and blue feathers were closing in on her face. She nodded a greeting and I nodded back.
My husband appeared in the kitchen, mussed from sleep.
‘You mustn’t do this’, he said.
I ignored him.
He stepped forward then and slapped my rump. I continued to ignore him. He slapped it again. There was a sharp sting that went through me each time but he kept slapping and slapping and down went my ears and I stamped my hooves and my skin prickled with irritation.
But my husband doesn’t know much about horses. He doesn’t know what a slap will make us do.
He slapped and slapped, and he would not stop, until finally I lifted my nose from the sugar, and obeyed him, and started to run.