Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn Page A

nothing more than a feat of complex origami, a series of flat folds popped out to resemble a face.
    Fran was unmoored, and he was afraid. He thought of something that had happened with his mother. Right after his father moved out, while his mother sifted through her hobbies for some distraction, an orange tabby cat appeared, wormy and starved. His mother had been convinced it was their long-missing cat Sorbet, and she took the cat’s return as a reversal in her fortunes.
See, you lose one thing and something else comes back
, she’d say, doting on the cat with a pleasure he had not seen since the split. But the cat was obviously not Sorbet, who had left eight years prior and was two shades darker, and he laid out the evidence to his mother. She replied
I knew it
and sunk down and in as if being drawn through a straw at her feet. What had troubled him most, he recalled, was not the impression that his mom had indeed known and permitted herself to believe otherwise. What most disturbed him was how easily she gave in, and the haunting tone of self-reproach as she shooed the cat away.
    He stood up in front of Fran and lifted his hands in the air several times in front of her as if trying to whip up the wind to pull her to her feet. She rolled her head toward him with a heavy looseness; regarding him and the icy pasture beyond with the sardonic gaze of someone who had been awoken from a deep sleep by the tail end of a bad joke. There was a lethargy in that look, a somnolent dark wisdom that seemed to echo the dead horse in that it was both disturbed and irrevocably in repose. He did not let himself be stalled. “
Fran
,” he said, bouncing a bit on the balls of his freezing feet, “I think the massage might work. It probably was working before I interrupted.” He swung his head back toward the hole where the curve of the horse’s hindquarterstill peeked above the edge, a half-moon of hide arched like a doubting brow.
    â€œI bet you just didn’t do it long enough. Or maybe you forgot a step. Didn’t my mother have another step in the massage?” He gestured frenetically over her; he mimed a more perfect massage. His face flushed with impatience and a building panic; restoring Fran seemed the key-stone to getting free of this bizarre business. He thought again of his mother making that trek from the car to the house, nurse and daughter guiding her every step, and it seemed essential that Fran, at least, still saw a powerful sage, a spellbinder. “Maybe you missed a pressure point, or maybe you started at the wrong place.” Fran’s hooded flinty eye rolled either in dismissal or in a circular assessment of the scene: snowy ground, house and stable, his stricken face, the backhoe bucket-edge, the horse just out of sight.
    He squatted down in front of her and began to rattle off all the ways she might have mishandled the massage in a ragged low whisper. Though she remained silent, he kept repeating himself, like a refrain, but soon even that disintegrated into a wandering monologue about how his mother must always be trusted in these cases, though this case had never, should never, and possibly was not occurring. The idea that a dead horse floated a mere ten feet away made everything he said seem, at turns, superfluous or courageous—what could he say in the face of such a cosmic aberration, and listen to how boldly he spoke despite the aberration. Fran’s eyes had the buffed sheen of faraway thoughts, and she gave him a pitying look, as if he was the one operating under a harmless, but poignant, delusion. That look—though perhaps he had misread it—frightened him more than the dead horse itself. It seemed to indicate this grand shake-up in the world’s logic was just another disappointing fact of reality to be faced, another test of one’s maturity, one’s grace.
    â€œThink about it—you must have missed a step.”
    He walked back to the hole,