His Family Worked with Horses

His family worked with horses. And his face, the soft brimming mustache that wasn’t quite all the way there, reminded me of a horse. Not long, not drawn out, not spectacularly toothy. Just something faintly equine in his facial mannerisms. Hot breath against my shoulder.

This is the boy who was blamed for everything, the eldest son, genetic magnet for sorrow. There was a sister. There were two sisters. One would grow up to be beautiful, long black hair, dusky skin, eyes that looked pierced and angelic at the same time. The other sister was the reason for the blame.

He had been left to babysit. Keep an eye on her, they told him, they’d be right back. There was a heated oven that day, a casserole dish inside, the mother saying it would be fine until they returned. The glass on the front of the oven grew hot as the casserole baked. This boy, this oldest son, opened a bottle of Pepsi and slumped into the couch. The television was on. When his sister began to whimper from the kitchen, he turned the volume up.

This is not my story to write. It’s not up to me to tell you about the parents coming home, how they discovered the little girl sitting with her hands pressed to the oven glass, fingers seared pink and yet still pinned to the glass, a new glaze across her eyes that would never go away, a glaze that would change everything.

It’s not my place to tell you about the years that followed, when the sister lost her ability to speak, to use the bathroom, to feed herself. None of this belongs to me. Not the girl, not the doctor who explained several years down the road that this would have happened anyway, oven or not, preoccupied brother or not, it was there, crouching latent inside her, a twisted gene waiting to bloom in its own crooked, predetermined way.

I can’t give you any of this. I can only tell you about the boy who held my hair in his hands the same way he held the burning embers of that day inside him. I can only say that when he kissed me, I didn’t think about what it must have been like to carry the blame for his family’s ration of damage. I didn’t think about whether his hands which moved along me, smoothing the skin of my lower back, preserved the scars his father’s cigarettes had left behind, small puckered kisses against tanned skin. The boy’s breath was warm, his mustache was soft, and when his lips brushed across my neck, it made me think of horses.

You can email Theresa at theresa@theresaboyar.com.