That Long Spring
by Bethany Reid
That long spring of her fifteenth year,
she told herself, “I am too old to be a horse.”
So she stopped tossing her head
in that particular way her mother hated,
as if her mane caught the sunlight.
After chores, she walked from the barn
to the house without breaking into a gallop.
That was the year she nursed a crush on a boy
in the class ahead of her. But another girl
asked him to the Sadie Hawkins Day dance,
and after that, they were going steady.
In May, when the prom rolled around,
she helped decorate the lunchroom, fanning
pink tissues and stuffing them in chicken wire
to look like roses or gardenias, some climbing flower,
though they looked, really, like nothing
but wadded Kleenex. Her arms ached
from the effort of holding herself quiet. She stood
in the parking lot beneath a night sky
that would gladly have taken her,
a sky thick with stars as an Appaloosa’s back.
A half-moon skimmed the dark,
clouds trailing like broken reins.
