Choiceless

I never get tired of watching him work. Dust kicks up from under the horse’s hooves as she circles him. He turns with her, always facing her hindquarters, snapping the whip in the air behind her every time he sees her think about slowing or stopping or changing directions, driving her continuously forward. She snorts irritably, tosses her head occasionally, but she also licks her lips and swivels her ear towards him. She’s listening, I realize – she just doesn’t want him to know that.

He knows though. I can tell by the way he watches her. When did I become so good at reading him?

When he’s not working with horses, it always seems like he’s aware of me no matter where I am, whether we’re near each other or not. I always try to ignore it, but now that he’s ignoring me, there’s that pang in my chest that’s become as familiar as the pain in my legs have, but how could I feel like I’ve lost something that I never had? Something I’m not even sure actually exists?

Frustrated with myself and him, I stumble away from the round pen’s fence, leaning heavily on my crutches as I stagger back to the barn, back to the tack room to clean saddles and bridles. It’s just about the only way I can earn my keep here.

About ten minutes after I’ve settled in to work, I hear footsteps and hoofbeats on the concrete floor out in the aisle – Carson’s done. I listen to him lead the horse to her stall and rub her down. I can hear him speaking to her softly, his tone warm, but I don’t understand the words he says. I don’t know enough English.

When I finish cleaning the saddle, I push myself painfully to my feet. Before I can pick up the saddle though to put it away, Carson does it for me.

“Here?” he asks, in German, moving to the empty saddle rack I got it from. When I nod, he slides it into place. “Sit down,” he tells me. “I’ll get them for you.” I met a family of tourists once a few years ago. They knew some German, but they were far from fluent, their sentences broken as they struggled to put the right words together. Carson’s still learning too, but his sentences don’t break much. Usually, he just keeps his sentences short and simple, but the longer ones he slows down for, thinking it all out as he speaks. He’s not fluent, but I think he knows more than he remembers a lot of the time.

“You don’t have to,” I try to tell him.

He smiles, his eyes just as warm as his voice when he says, “I know. I want to.”

I don’t understand why, but I don’t know how to ask. I sit down instead, pointing to the saddle I need to clean next.

“I didn’t know Ripley had any German in her,” he says as he puts the saddle on the freestanding rack in front of me. He settles himself on the floor against a tackle box filled with broken and extra straps. “She’s just so…Irish.”

“We have the same grandmother. Her mother moved to Ireland before she was born.”

“So you never met her before coming here?”

I shake my head. I didn’t even know I had Irish family until I was had to come live with them in America.

“Then why did you decide to move here?”

It’s an innocent question, but it still causes the pang in my chest, the tightening that makes it hard to breathe and even harder to want to. I focus on the saddle so that he won’t see.

“I was in an accident with my parents. They died and my legs were crushed.” There’s more to the damage that was done to me that day, but I can’t bring myself to go into any details about the crash. He wouldn’t care about all that anyway. “The only living family I have now is here. There was never a choice.”

It’s quiet for a few minutes, the only sound coming from the cloth rubbing against leather.

Eventually, he says softly, “I’m sorry that happened to you.”