It is the night of the lunar eclipse and a man I am planning to love drops dead of a heart attack, though I won’t know this until tomorrow. Actually, he is driving, and slumps dead, his heart popping softly like a bad firecracker. My sorrel gelding is old and has colic this night. The book says, “Walk the horse unceasingly; take heart at peristaltic sounds.” We circle the lawn in perfect syncopation; when I press my ear to his side, his belly is tight and silent. In the house next door the windows are open; my neighbors are making love. Is there anything more lonely than this? Watch your heart, I whisper. What we say aloud ascends to Heaven. How God orchestrates these moments: frozen in the arc of the stable light, a red fox plays possum, her heart tripping in her chest; the red horse, deciding not to die, shifts his weight off my shoulder as suddenly as the sky turns red in the middle of the night. Across town, at a lazy intersection, the man puts his hand to his heart. He is puzzled by how his life leaves him; there is nothing of the past, and the light he sees at the end of the tunnel is not white, but red. He is dreaming, instead, of a copper fox, a sorrel horse, a woman whose heart he can hear as she opens her arms to the luminous sky and swears, This is how I will love you. © Andrea King Kelly Andrea King Kelly is in the Ph.D. program in English at Florida State University where she has been the recipient of four Kingsbury Writing Fellowships, the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, the Phi Kapa Phi Artist Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Creative Writing Award. She is the winner of the 1992 Hemingway Prize for short fiction, and the 1997 Writer's Digest contemporary short story competition. She is currently working on a novel, Wiregrass, a short story collection, A Summer of Women, a poetry collection, Red Moon, and a collection of personal essays, Love Me Tender. She is poetry editor for International Quarterly. |
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