Horse Girl Hanging

How soft it felt, the bread. I bit into its flesh, sinking into the doughy velvet. Inside my mouth the whirlwind of flavors, like waves melting on my tongue. Then, her image. A hazy mirage. The day turned into night. The sun cross-dissolved into the moon. I never really knew her. She was in a different class in middle school. She was a horse girl. She offered me a book to read, and I never gave it back. I heard she died twenty years ago. I felt sick from guilt. What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with a girl who hangs herself in her parents’ garage? To be so distraught, to see no way out! I have a dream where she told a friend, cried for help. I have a dream where her parents didn’t find her hanging from a noose. Anyway, I didn’t know this girl. We just went to the same school. Talked about horses, that’s it. Finito. She looked like the girl next door. It’s hard to understand why she chose the crudest method under the sun. Think trembling at the end of a rope. A few minutes is a long time to rethink your life, eyes bulging out of your head, shit dripping through a trouser leg. Think changing your mind, unable to release the rope. I wonder if she left a letter, a diary. If a secret kept her in a chokehold. Think Laura Palmer. Look behind her sweet smile: a mere child fallen into darkness. Bob took her to the woods. The demonic entity that possessed a man and did bad things to girls. Laura Palmer, the homecoming queen. Murdered at the age of seventeen. Her body wrapped in plastic, like leftovers discarded on the beach of Blue Pine Lodge. Bite marks on her shoulders and tongue, lesions on her wrists. The autopsy concluded sexual relations with at least three men that night. I was fourteen when I read Laura Palmer’s secret diary with a flashlight instead of sleeping. I imagined us at wild parties. Laura Palmer, nose powdered in coke, twirling around men twice our age. I kept my head under the covers, carved an opening for air like I was hiding from Bob, too. I’m already gone, Laura Palmer whispered, her plump lips glowing. Soon I understood why her eyes stared into the void. I was sixteen when a man took me to his room. He didn’t say there was a hockey team of men waiting. No book prepares you. The men shared me like a cigar from mouth to mouth. They opened my jaw wide, poured liquor down my throat, unzipped their jeans. I couldn’t count the hands touching me, in the bathroom, on the bed. The room spun like the red leather seats in the town diner. There was a box of donuts on the Sheriff’s desk. I saw Dr Jacoby crying in his hammock, a shell pressed to his ear. It was the brain’s greatest trick; I floated out of my body. Split off parts of myself. I burned, like the pages of a diary in a wood fire pit. I thought of death often. The pulse on my wrists. How the arteries would open like a surge of water, a creek swelling to a river. It took me years to understand I wasn’t responsible. Danger looms in the distance like a deer in haze. A foggy night distorts the vision. No violates politeness. A party turns into an assault. Was I meant to fight or scream? I bit my tongue. The horse girl must have been hiding something. Those quiet girls harbor secrets. They end up in rooms you’d never guess. Perhaps some sleazy mechanic in a denim jacket crouched by her bed. Perhaps she waited for someone to enter, drifted out in a dream. I think of her dangling from the garage ceiling. How her parents opened the raised-panel door. How they saw her shoes and shins, their mouths opened like tombs before the screams. Their sweet girl! Suspended from the ceiling like wisteria. Head drooped like a bluebell, white pollen foaming from the mouth. I let my mind play with her image, until the iris of her eye turns into an orchid. Laura Palmer stands under my ceiling fan, waving at me to save her. Arms curled like contorted stems, pruned and trained from an early age, her lips blue from nightmares. Until I am back in the room, pressed into the bed, the boozy breaths on my neck. The shadows of men shaping the walls, light creeping in through the keyhole. I see the horse girl smiling in her butterscotch hair, taking a book from her backpack. Hands it to me like the truth, a riddle between the pages I never opened. I see the horse girl walking into the garage, into the mouth of death. Pointing a flashlight to the ligature point in the throat of monsters. She lifts the noose over her head, like a wreath beneath her ears. Closes her eyes. Thinks about the cascades of purple flowers hanging from her parents’ pergola, looking glorious in the spring day. The chair slams to the floor. The rope stretches. Climbs up like a vine, twirls down and around, snaps the neck with its dense grip. I try not to scream. Now I remember! Her name, too, was Laura.

Terhi K. Cherry

Terhi K. Cherry is a poet, writer, and research psychologist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Mama, Rogue Agent, the Un(mother) film and anthology, Cultural Weekly, Vox Viola Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Terhi lives in Los Angeles and facilitates poetry for personal growth.