The Stable at the Hour of the Wolf
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The key still worked. She hadn't expected that. The lock turned with the same resistance it had twenty years ago, that small catch at three o'clock that you had to persuade. It had always done its job. The padlock positioned high to discourage thieves shrugged off as ordinary. She opened the door, allowing the smell that was already familiar to ripple out towards her -- the same as she had breathed as long as she could remember in the heat of summer. Old wood with old nails and raw timber and beeswax, with new flower buds and hot, dairy-grass and fennel, cloves and ergot and others -- no but think of the new born colts on summers nights in the forests near the village still unreclaimable and unknown except by those that walked dark spots in their thoughts and were luckier than the rest. She stood with her nose crushed against the peicket edging the door and inhaled deeply. It was time to isolate herself. Hearing feet scuttling back to her where they had left her standing to catch a whiff of this heavenly scent, a warm ragged sigh burst from her lips. It was all right with her. She was content.
Never were there such animals as changed over time to become as graceful as they were then. Back in the stable, they strucktersantly waited to be given tasks of their own. There were horses and two goats, but the latter might have been horses.
In there, it would be the quiet of hering room all the time. A river ran just behind the stable where main-coloured carp sighed peacefully in the stream. Footsteps sounded. The hands of the clock turned, returning herself very quickly. She made the motion of the clock, slowly. Everything was just as she thought it would have to be. Beautiful lillies blurred in the sunlight -- spreading her arms, she strode out across the grass, listening for the fly of a door that she might have perhaps late gone for a knife with which to do herself over. She didn't think she had it in her to do that now. Not after all this time. Memory was a restless beast, out there in the open fields, far away from where they might have put it underground.
When she turned to face the stable, she didn't need to study through the shadows towards where it might lie -- she could see it quite clearly in the distance. "Stepmother," she said to nothing in particular. "Stepmother," she said to things belonging to nothing in particular. "Stepmother!" And inside the stable, the rocking horse shifted it's head and scraped one of it's feet on the floor before pulling back a leg and bringing it in her way. "Can I help you?" she said, more softly now, once more intending to walk around him.
One morning he lay down and never got up again. He hadn't been feeling well for some time, or at least that's what he told/had told himself. Now all this was starting to make sense. "What a waste," she heard coming up from a place far away, as if from beneath the ground. Maybe she wasn't saying it, but it was the way things were said. I can taste it, she mused, as she did mouth it to herself in bed. Twice in the middle of that night. There was movement, gurgling and muttering. He looked older than she remembered, but it hardly mattered. He's been dead for years, or hasn't he?
The Indians had a name for it. She had a tendency◆ About the ending
❧ About the title