There’s a man standing in the corner of my room and he’s talking to me. It’s pitch black except for a sliver of light crawling through the blinds and I can only make out his shape. He’s either wearing a very tall hat or he has a very long head. 

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“When you take a look at your feet,” he says, “you’re going to notice something is a little different. A little off.” I feel like laughing, but he’s dead serious. 

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“I can’t look at my feet,” I say, wiggling what I think are my toes around beneath layers of blanket.

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“You will,” he says, “at a later time. For now, don’t think about it too much.” This man is dressed like he’s from the year 1900. The shadows are doing a dance, bouncing off of the walls with bursts of energy. I can’t see his eyes even if I squint. Does he have any?

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“Don’t worry, it’s only temporary.” 

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My sockets get all heavy and I wonder if I should get up and walk a few feet to the kitchen and get some tea bags out of a tin I found in a tunnel a while back. Dark under eye circles aren’t a good look on me. It was a nice tunnel, I think. You could hear yourself think. Abraham Lincoln or whoever must see the tunnel too, because he’s above me now, like my mother, telling me I can always go back down there. He says the sewers smell like piss. I drift out of consciousness. 

 

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Nobody’s there to wake me up. I don’t remember the top hat man anymore, only a concept. A vague idea of what he was. If he was there at all. He told me not to worry, so when I look down at my feet and see hooves, I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am. Everything’s different in the morning. I’m finding that I don’t fit in my bed like I should. I don’t think this bed was made for me. The light is creeping in now, and I know I can’t lie here forever. But I can’t get up. If I stand, the floor beneath me will crack and I’ll free fall down twenty stories. It’d be a slaughter. My hair feels nice though. It’s thick and soft. I can’t reach up to touch it, only feel it against my skull. I’m too big for this blanket. At first, I think, it can’t be that bad. I could be one of those miniature horses. They’re still bigger than people. Think about it, how are you not splitting the floorboards beneath you right now? Try to get up. No. My bones are white and thick like a dinosaur’s. They should put me in a museum. Horse girl. That would be the name of my exhibition. I think it sounds like one of those names they’d have for people with deformities who were in the circus back then. Freak shows, whatever. Elephant man. Lobster boy. Three-breasted woman. Horse girl. I want to be a prize pony. I want to wear a blue ribbon. My friend Vega calls me on the phone at what I think is ten a.m. from the way the sun hits the wall of the factory across the street. Smoke rises up in steady puffs through its head. 

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“Hey,” she says. “You there?” She goes on to tell me about a brunch reservation we have in thirty minutes. 

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I made it a few days ago, at a place called Yolk. Yolk serves special eggs, coughed up by these special blind chickens from this Northwest region of Virginia, scrambled and fried to perfection. 

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“Sorry,” I try to say, but my front teeth look all janky and one is yellow and the size my hand used to be. “I don’t think I can make it. Something came up,” It comes out in a neigh. I’m not going anywhere. 

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The sun inches its way up the brick wall and I think if I cough, a small child will come out. I think about Vega sitting by herself at Yolk. The waiter with a lobe piercing so low it could hit his shoulder brings her fried duck shit. She says thanks. I think about my mother. I want to get up and type an email, write a letter, do something, but I weigh a thousand pounds and I cannot move and she is dead. The day that Paloma left me in the dust to die, my mother told me she was disappointed. I can see why. She told me, you let an animal that you were supposed to have full control over, overpower you. They’re weak, she said. They’re animals. They don’t have autonomy. Big words for a fifth grader. Now that I’m a horse, I know it’s true. I don’t have autonomy. If I keep on living like this, if my body doesn’t return to how it was, the best bet for me is to be domesticated. Trotted in a muzzle out of this apartment, shipped off in a trailer to somewhere in Northern Vermont where they’ll feed me gluten-free muesli. I can’t stay awake. I can feel tears pooling under my eyes. Can horses cry? I’m big, I’m bony, I’m stuffed like a taxidermy and I feel sick. 

 

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I’m twelve again. Tucked under milky white hospital sheets, they stand like I’m an open casket. My mother is telling the nurses how I was this—she pinches her thumb and index finger so close together—this close to winning, until it happened. Later on, when they tell me I’ll never ride again she starts to sob. She covers her eyes to hide the tears rolling down her cheeks. I see them anyway, through the gaps. She sniffs and tells me Paloma was a good horse. I can’t move my neck but I try to nod. I feel closer to Paloma than ever. 

 

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In eleventh grade, my school tried to put on a play of The Metamorphosis. This kid named Bobby was cast as Gregor Samsa. Bobby was a big guy with asthma. He could play the trombone great. The Metamorphosis was his first stint as an actor and his last. It was comical, actually. They stuffed Bobby in a brown roach costume. Felt thorax and all. I went to the first dress rehearsal during 5th period as an excuse to skip class. I plopped down breathlessly in a creaky faux velvet seat. The lights came up, everything was going great. Lo and behold, Bobby laying flat on the P.E teacher’s personal bed, a roach. 

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“What has happened to me?” Bobby delivered his first line flawlessly. I stifled a laugh. He flailed around, kicking his roach legs up and down helplessly. 

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“Gregor was a traveling salesman,” a pre-recorded audio played over the sound system. Then one of Bobby’s arms came poking through one of Gregor’s giant bug eyes. He waved the arm around, grasping at nothing with his chubby hand. 

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“Oh my God!” Bobby screamed. 

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Wow, this guy knows how to act, I thought. Bobby’s breathing got very heavy and fast.

 

“Gregor realized it was half-past six,” the recording continued. 

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“INHALER,” Bobby gasped. 

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My eyes widened as I realized what I was witnessing. It was dead silent as Bobby writhed and squirmed, losing air by the second. The narration, accompanied by a few solemn piano keys here and there, had stopped. I assumed someone from the booth was coming down to get Bobby. Watching the whole thing go down, I was frozen in my seat. I felt paralyzed. I felt like I was observing a situation too funny to be real, and to this day I’m not sure it happened. But the proof is all there. I kept a flyer for the play, and when I moved out, brought it with me. It’s buried deep in a drawer somewhere. Bobby was fine, of course. He ended up at RISD painting portraits exclusively of people with lazy eyes. I think he married an entomologist. 

 

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Well, I really feel like Bobby now that I’m a horse. For a brief moment, until everyone came rushing onto the stage and jumped on Bobby to shove an inhaler in his mouth, he was transported to a different body. He was a real life roach, lacking any control of his own body. I’m a real life horse. I bet my neck veins are thick and blue. I think there are worse things I could have woken up as. I could have been a tapeworm, destined to spend my days slithering around in someone’s intestines until they popped enough pills to shit me out. Down the toilet. I could’ve been a spider at summer camp. I’d scuttle around on my skinny legs like any other camper, getting lost in the girl’s cabin one sticky night, finding myself being beaten to death with a slipper against a screen door. Bug guts. You can’t squash a horse. 

 

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Back home, I killed this bug by smashing it against the wall with a book I didn’t plan on reading. I kept him there on my wall, the dead bug. I had a tendency to let dead things live in my room. Dead flowers, too. I didn’t do it to be artsy, I was lazy. I kept a flower I had been given in a clear glass painted with pink and red hearts. The flower started to mold. My mom insisted that I throw it out. I told her I just didn’t have the heart to get rid of it while it was living, and once it was dead, I didn’t want to touch it anymore. I threw it out. One Saturday, the guy I was seeing and I got into a fight in my room. He flew backwards against the wall, and the bug corpse fell to his feet. 

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“What the fuck is that?” He threw his hands up. 

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“It’s a dead bug,” I said. “I couldn’t just take him off the wall right after killing him.”

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“You’re so annoying,” he said. “I fucking hate you.” 

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My mother’s funeral was the first time I felt free. Watching them lower her spotty white corpse wrapped up in several thousand dollars worth of mahogany into the ground, I knew a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I once asked her if we could have a funeral for Paloma. She told me animals don’t need funerals. Paloma was a good horse, she said. But she was an animal, not your friend. I let the tears rain down the sides of my neck brace. She told me to stop crying. Animals don’t deserve funerals. They threw one for my mother anyway. 

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“Annie was a difficult woman,” Her sister, my Aunt, said to no one in particular while cutting herself a slice of sheet cake at the afterparty. 

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I stood next to her, chewing on the prongs of a clear plastic fork. Since I stopped growing at ten, the massive chocolate fountain decorated with daisies (my mother’s favorite) towered over me and hid my cowardly stature. Coming around the fountain, my Aunt jumped in surprise. Her mouth hung open in an O shape. She looked comical. Cartoonish. 

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“Oh, sweetie,” she cried, wrapping her flabby arm around my stiff shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to hear that.” 

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“Oh no,” I said, staring straight ahead at the giant portrait they’d hung up of my mother, “Don’t worry about it.” 

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“She loved you very much.” This was the voice of her mother, my grandmother.

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“She always supported you and your riding. So unfortunate what happened.” 

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Such unfortunate things happen when your mother works you like a dog day and night from the ripe age of five, I wanted to say. Instead I said, right. So unfortunate. In a dingy motel room that evening, I patted myself on the back for my composure. Sleep through tonight and you’ll be in the city. Away from this suburban stucco hell. 

 

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The phone rings by my oversized side again. A voice on the other side comes slinking through the receiver like a crocodile in a swamp. I know this voice from anywhere. It’s the man in the hat. 

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“Hello Paloma,” he says. 

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“Hello,” I say. 

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“It’s good to be back isn’t it?” I stare up at the white ceiling, laying in a screwed up position on my humped back. I still can’t move. As it heats up outside, my snow white fur is getting hot. Sweaty, even.

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“It’s good to be back.” 

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