My Horse Only Spoke English

The sun bore down upon him with unrelenting intensity as if he were an ant under a magnifying glass. Sweat clotted his bronzed brow and crawled about his head. He bobbed in the disequilibrium that dehydration had brought upon him. His exhaustion, as he rode this cracked hardpan, had reached the point where he could not recall how he came upon this wasteland, nor what his destination was.

“Me llamo Pablo,” he muttered under his breath only to definitively confirm that he still had an identity, even if nothing else in his world seemed to have an origin or meaning.

“Hello, Pablo,” a strange and deep voice said to him from below.

Qué es eso? he thought to himself and dared not wonder aloud. On his left was nothing but sagebrush, rocks, and then mountains in the far-off distance.

¿La Sierra Madre Occidental?

Was that correct? He knew not. He looked to his right and saw some cacti tossed about and more split hardpan. Behind him was a flat horizon fluctuating thanks to the shimmering waves of heat rising off the earth.

Ahead of him, another set of hoof-tracks extended as far as the eye could see.

“Awfully rude of you not to say anything when I just introduced myself, Pablo.”

That guttural voice called up to him anew. He was too stunned and scared to speak. The sentence was punctuated by a belated neigh.

The horse was speaking.

In shock, he fell off his saddle, out of his stirrups, and onto the ground. He got up and dusted himself off, looked disbelievingly at his Andalusian, and said:“¿Tú hablas?”

“If you’re asking me if I talk, Pablo, yes I do.”

Seeing it and hearing it simultaneously, he now knew it to be true. He was astonished at having confirmed the existence of a talking horse, that the larger issue escaped his attention. He couldn’tremember her face, but he knew his mother taught him manners, and he employed them.

“Perdóname, ¡Hola! ¿Como te llamas?”

“Phaeton.”

Pablo absorbed that but didn’t dwell on it long. A list of obvious questions popped into his head. Where was he? What he was doing here? Where was he going? He wasn’t of a mind for formalities, so he cut straight to the questions.

“¿Donde estamos?”

“What are you asking, Pablo?”

“¿Sabes hablar español?” Pablo asked.

“We’re in America; speak English,” Phaeton said.

“¿Qué estamos haciendo en América?”

He could feel judgment in the horse’s tone of voice.

“¿Por qué no me estás respondiendo? Yo sé que me entiendes.”

“We can’t go on like this, Pablo.”

He was suddenly overcome with thirst, such that it supplanted his outrage that his horse could talk, but only in English, and in an ignorant racist way at that.

He pointed to the mountains.

“Charades, Pablo? You know, I find that kind of ingenuity admirable. I’ll play.”

For a second, he wondered if he’d judged his horse too harshly, but he just knew he was being condescended to now. The meaning of the words he used was not needed to understand what he wanted to know.

The horse raised a hoof like he was going to tap it, like horses that can count, but instead, it seemed to point.

“You want to know the name of the mountains?”

“Sí.”

“Desatoya.”

“Nevada.”

“Yes.”

“¿Cómo llegué aqui?”

“I don’t understand that, Pablo.”

“Mula.”

“That I do understand.”

“¡Burro!”

“That too.”

Pablo was huffing and lightheaded. He was atwitter as his life was threatened and it was asinine.

He didn’t know where he was, his father’s name, his mother’s face, if he had a dog, how old he was; how was he then to remember if he had ever learned English and if he retained any of it?

Right then and there, trying to formulate a question in a language he didn’t even know if he could speak, he collapsed.

#

He awoke feeling woozy, bouncing, riding bareback as Phaeton ambled. He’d collapsed, he knew. His head ached: his neck was strained.

¿Cómo estoy aqui? he thought.

He put a hand on his neck as if to try and massage out a tension knot when he felt some warm viscosity. Upon removing his hand, he saw blood.

Lightheadedness returned but he inhaled deeply and was alert anew. He lifted his hand again and felt the wound. It was deep and there were many.

“Dientes.”

That’s when he finally realized that it wasn’t a strain but a dull pulsing, even so it was quite a feat for a horse to lift a human by his neck and onto his back.

“¿Cómo hiciste eso, Phaeton?”

Phaeton continued to trot along. No response.

In the sky, he saw vultures circling, in the treetops grackles perched. On the horizon, he saw distant peaks. If those were still the Desatoya Mountains, they were further off in the background. Then a more sinister thought occurred to Pablo.

“Caballo…” he said simply, “¿Tu me mientes?”

The terrain now grew uneven. It was harder for Pablo to keep his balance; his ribs and hip hurt from his unconscious tumble. His eyesight was blurry.

“Sed,” he was barely able to say, for his mouth was so dry. There was no water about. Only then did he realize that not only was the terrain more uneven, but they had come to salt flats.

The white beneath him burst in a cloud, as his jaw crunched the salty ground.

As he lay dying, he heard the horse say to him:

“No lo tomes mal.”

 And he was dead.

#

The sun blazed with unstoppable force. Sweat darkened her blond hair, her blue eyes bloodshot. Her head jostled about as dehydration had all but consumed her.

There came a point where she finally took in the golden sand being kicked about by her Arabian and wondered how she had gotten to this desert and why. She had even forgotten her name and had to recall it.

“My name is Anna,” she gasped.

“¡Hola, Anna!” A strange, tenebrous voice said from down below. This jolted her and she looked straight down. Being in the desert, she was wary of mirages but never guessed a talking horse might appear in one. How could this get her the water she desperately needed?

“Was that you?”

“¡Sí!”

“What’s your name then, Mr. Chatterbox?” she said, hoping that playing along would get her real information.

“Sterope,” said the jet-black horse.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Igualmente.”

“Can’t you please speak English? It’s all I know and I need to know where I am and how I got here?”

 "Usted me guía.”

“That’snot a help. At least a name I might know. I can’t understand how a horse can talk, and what’s the point if it’s in another language?”

"Usted no entiende porque usted está en el desierto. Usted no entiende la vida. Usted no entiende nada.”

“Where are we, Sterope?”

“¿Qué estas me preguntando, Anna?”

I don’t know much Spanish, but this seems real? Anna said to herself.

"Estamos en México. Hable español, Anna” Sterope said.

Mexico.

Only then did she see cacti breaking up what truly looked like an Arabian desert for a while.

“What are we doing in Mexico?” she asked. Sterope did not respond.

“You’ve understood me, don’t stop talking, now!”

“No podemos continuar así.”

“Mexico is a big country; help me narrow it down.”

She pointed at the cacti.

“¿A qué estás apuntando?”

“The cactus.”

“No es nopal.”

“No?”

“Es cáñamo.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Claro.”

“Where are we?”

 “No le digo.”

 “You’re as stubborn as a mule.”

“Yo entiendo eso.”

“Jackass.”

“Eso también lo entendi.”

Anna was angry and feeling lightheaded. She barely remembered her name. She had forgotten the face of her father, the feel of her mother’s bosom, where she was from; if she had ever taken Spanish in school, it was lost to her now.

Her breathing shallowed and Sterope trotted on. She collapsed.

#

She awoke in a haze and could barely see. For a second she thought her vision had clouded over, but then she discovered that it wasn’t that she couldn’t see well but that that the surroundings had changed entirely. The land was white. It was windy. When a gust kicked up, the white blew in her eyes.

“Salt,” she said in shock as her eyes closed.

“Sal,” Sterope said as he broke into a gallop.

As the confusion and disorientation receded upon her waking, she started to feel the pain in her neck. The slight corneal abrasions the salt caused were a lesser concern compared to the dull throb in her neck. Angrily, she shouted as blood ran out of tooth-shaped gashes on her neck.

“You bit me!”

“Te caíste. Yo te recogí.”

Anna’s side hurt; her leg was abraded and scabbed.

“How long have we ridden since I fell?”

“Caballos no usan relojes.”

She could tell the tone was condescending and that Sterope had, in his answer, pretended to be a common horse.

“You’re not a regular horse, not even a regular talking horse.”

He stopped suddenly. She thought she had won.

“Estamos aquí,” Sterope said simply. Then he kicked his forelegs and reared back. After being bounced up, and still off-kilter, Anna slid off and fell into the salt.

Looking across from her she saw a young boy about her age. He was dead and in that brief moment she could tell he had once been beautiful. Not too tall or too big, dark hair; he was a boy she could have fallen in love with, shared her first kiss with, maybe more. He had bite marks in his neck too; that once beautiful face was chewed up and rotting; chunks taken out of his shoulder were now covered over in windblown salt, flies, and maggots; his ribcage was exposed and cracked; cakes of ruddy salt surrounded him as the grains had supped upon all the blood that flowed, much of it from his left leg, where no calf remained.

Anna then turned to see the Arabian glaring at her menacingly, cockeyed.

“You brought me here to kill me,” she lamented.

The Arabian, who called himself Sterope in this iteration, replied with words that Pablo would understand all too well:

“Don’t take it the wrong way.”

And she was dead.