Night Horse

Sophie Spanner

Ahead was a horse. The horse had gaping eyes, like terrified glass. People say there’s depth in a horse's eyes, or that you can see their soul, or something. I don’t believe it. Something about the fact that only one eye can ever be looking at you properly. People I can look in the eyes with both my eyes and it’s horrible but it’s also a moment of intimacy, right? Your attention is wholly undiverted, all-encompassing. It’s a challenge and a compromise. Horses are half-there. And when bobbing down this road I had never driven down before in the middle of the night, car rattling, and this horse I had never seen looked at me with its one shining, porcelain eye, I wondered what it saw on the other side.

I braked, puttered, stopped. The horse didn’t move, frozen in a moment of fear: like ceramic, like Pompeii statues. If you look a horse straight-on, it can’t see you. Blindspot. It’s like Twilight Zone, I think. The peripheral unknown. The horse was beautiful, and I’ve never thought that about a horse before. Heavy twitching muscles, innocently spotted — grand, really, like the feeling you get when you see a marble staircase. So I stopped the car, climbed out. I didn’t want to scare the thing, but I also wanted it to move out of the way. We danced, two steps forward, two back. If I ever faced a big animal I didn’t think it was going to feel like this, so timid. Mostly I imagined the fear. Prey in the face of a predator. I extended my hand, low and cautious. Olive branch.o Still, the horse stepped back, stepped further, then faster, escaped the scope of my headlights entirely, off and away. Its retreating steps were thunder under dark clear skies.

As a worrier, by nature and by practice, I couldn’t help but think, Surely, this horse must belong to someone! I had never heard of anyone seeing a wild horse, not in this part of the country. Where would a horse even sleep? Where are the baby horses? Is it stranger, I thought, to have an entire unseen population of wild horses, or one wild horse, single and apparently eternal?

I was driving to a birthday party I wasn’t all that keen on attending. It was for a friend, one I hadn’t talked to in over a year. Probably since his last birthday. I figured the invitation was out of a pity born of birthday-proximity — mine was the day before his, and in the past we spent those days together. We had gone through periods of being extremely close, spending multiple days a week together despite living forty-five minutes away, the hours we spent talking immeasurable. He taught me guitar riffs and how to skateboard. Other times we went months at a time without talking. When he started dating someone, I was happy — happy for him, and happy, maybe, for myself. It answered the questions I had, if ever, if ever. In some ways, I think I knew him more than anyone else. In other ways, his life was a mystery to me. Blindspot.

When he invited me, it was unexpected — for a year our friendship was, for lack of a better term, absent. In fact, I wasn’t sure we were still friends at all. My father had offered some advice, though lackluster: He is always disappearing. It’s okay to let him. Until then, I had experienced our relationship as monolithic. I couldn’t tell you what he thought. What does a horse do when it disappears into the woods? I couldn’t say. But he asked me to come back, and I felt myself looking into porcelain eyes, behind which was a black box.

No one was good at knowing him. It was possible I got close, but there’s no real way to tell. The thought of seeing him that night scared me. The other side scared me. The headlights only reached so far. As I got back in and drove on, I was swallowed by the night, entirely unseeable.

Sophie Spaner is a student at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ART | Dead Bird Study by Uriel Teague, 2024. Uriel Teague is a student at Yale University.