Horses in Another Life
A weighted pen, why a weighted pen, it had a head, a face with a jaguar’s mouth around it, big orchid petals with jewels behind that — it all made of clay and stuck on the end of a pen. I bought it for five dollars — man was selling weighted pens with all kinds of symbolism in the clay. I asked, How far is Lafayette Station? and he pointed and handed me the pen saying it was a parrot not a jaguar but I took the pen knowing he’d made a mistake and tapped the weighted end in my palm all the way to the platform.
They didn’t have a handrail in my train. I thought it was law they have handrails in-train but instead I wedged myself and searched the faces, the eyes, the sunglasses for signs I could sit down, do anything but lean, my knees had broken a year earlier and I could feel the blood gathering behind my patellas. A boy was playing with a mirror that balloons your reflection and I dipped down and put the jaguar in it but he yanked away before I could see the effect. But when the mirror moved I saw my eyes and I was far enough away that I was upside down.
I followed a man to the street with a tattoo of a punching fist on his forearm; but he had added — I learned by the difference in blur — a thumb to make the fist a thumbs-up. I held his shoulder as I went past. My knees were draining, upward, the blood returning to my heart. I slipped through a shop door. Two women were turning over a ceramic frog — ivory white with jade eyes, crouched — I slide past apologizing for my breath and laid the pen with the jaguar on the counter.
I had known the shopkeeper in a different life, when we rode horses through the hills and were good to our servants, but here he peered at me flatly and said, I’m not buying that. Why? I cried. There are fingerprints in the clay, he said and turned the pen in the light. I can’t sell clay with fingerprints. I withdrew a second pen, a glittering ball fixed at the end. That — five dollars, he said.
I went through the aisles considering his offer. I tapped the alarm clocks feeling the bells ring in my pads and examined the engraving of a horse and carriage in the handle of a letter opener. One of the women came back in, gave me a harassed smile to which I cast my eyes upward, and bought the ceramic frog. Her friend stood on the sidewalk struggling with an umbrella. I thought, I’d better hold up some cards, and so I held the four of diamonds to the window. She smiled to me and disappeared behind the canopy.