Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

looming like a dark mountain beside the barn. You make a telescope with your thumb and forefinger. Your fingernails are black to the quick. Land ho! you say. Crows land on the peak of the pile and send avalanches of dirty shavings down its sides. The ladies’ little dogs jump out of the open windows of their cars and come running to us, tags jingling.
    The ladies hardly ever ride. All day their horses stand out in the sun, their muscles like silk-covered stone. Sometimes they bring them in to the barn and tie them up in thecrossties, then wander into Curt’s house and don’t come out again. The horses wait patiently for an hour or so and then begin to paw and weave their heads. They can’t reach the flies settling on their withers, the itches on their faces they want to rub against their front legs. They dance and swivel in the aisle, and still the ladies won’t come out. Finally we unhook them from the ties and turn them back out in the pasture, where they spin and kick out a leg before galloping back to the herd. When the ladies come out of the little house, late in the afternoon, they squint in the light like they are coming out of a cave and don’t ever seem to notice that their horses are not where they left them.
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    We do everything we can think of to torture Curt. Before he goes out to work on the electric fence, he switches off the fuse in the big breaker box in the barn. We sneak around and flip it back on, then hide and wait to hear his curses when he touches the wire. You slap me five. He comes back into the barn and flicks a lunge whip at us, and we giggle and jump. When he turns away we whisper, I hate him. With pitchforks we fling hard turds of manure in his direction, and he hooks his big arms around our waists and dumps us headfirst into the sawdust pile. We squeal and throw handfuls at him when he walks away. Oh, how we hate him! We pretend we’ve forgotten his name.
    In the afternoon we ride our ponies close to the little house to spy on him. Their hooves make marks in the lawn likefingerprints in fresh bread. We ride as close as we dare and see things we don’t see in our parents’ houses: dirty laundry heaped in the hall, a cluster of dark bottles on top of the refrigerator, ashtrays and half-filled glasses crowding the kitchen table, which is just a piece of plywood on two sawhorses. Your pony eats roses from the bushes under the windows. He wears a halo of mosquitoes. From the bedroom we hear voices, Curt’s and a lady’s, but it is the only room in which the blinds have been pulled. We try to peer through the cracks, but the ponies yank at their bits and dance in the rosebushes, and we don’t really want to see, anyway. Come on, you say, and we head out to the back field to play circus acrobats, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, whatever mood happens to strike us this day.
    The ponies bear witness to dozens of pacts and promises. We make them in the grave light of late day, with every intention of keeping them. We cross our hearts and hope to die on the subjects of horses, husbands, and each other. We dare each other to do near-impossible things. You dare me to jump from the top of the manure pile, and I do, and land on my feet, with manure in my shoes. I double-dare you to take the brown pony over the triple oxer, which is higher than his ears. You ride hell-bent for it but the pony stops dead, throwing you over his head, and you sail through the air and land in the rails, laughing. We are covered in scrapes and bruises, splinters buried so deep in our palms that we don’t know they are there. Our bodies forgive us our risks, and the ponies do, too. We have perfected the art of falling.
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    We know every corner of the barn, every loose board, every shadow, every knot in the wood. It is old and full of holes, home to many things: bats and lizards and voles, spiders that hang cobwebs in the corners like hammocks, house sparrows that build