It's barely six in the morning and the mustang still won't come to the rail.
I sit on the overturned bucket where I always sit.
Coffee between my hands.
Steam off the top in a thin line, disappearing into the cold before it reaches my face.
The sky east of the barn is starting to go gray at the edge.
Another hour before the sun.
The horse stays where he's stayed for six weeks.
Far rail. Head low.
Watching me the way he'd watch a coyote if he didn't have enough in him to run anymore.
I don't talk to him.
Banshee taught me that.
You don't talk to a horse that hasn't asked.
You sit. You drink your coffee. You wait.
A horse that's been hurt the way this one's been hurt doesn't need a voice.
He needs proof that a man can exist in his air without costing him anything.
Six feet closer than last week.
Still six feet too far.
I don't move and neither does he.
Eleven months ago, I couldn't sleep.
I woke up at three on a Wednesday morning with my mouth dry and my chest wrong.
Sat on the edge of my bed for forty minutes trying to remember the order of the things I'd done the night before.
Bleach. Tarp. The weight of a woman I'd known by name but never touched.
I got up, put on boots, and walked to the barn.
Haven't missed a morning since.
The mustang flicks an ear.
He does that at the hour mark, sometimes, when the light changes enough that he registers me as a fixture and not a threat.
A small acknowledgement.
I drink my coffee.
I used to be the kind of man who couldn't sit still for ten minutes. I rode bulls. I chased anything that moved.
My body was a machine built to push against resistance, and if you stopped feeding it resistance, it started eating itself from the inside.
