Not the Color of the Rainbow
She stood outside, next to the horse corral, the morning dew still hung on the lips of palm trees. Her mouth pushed together, phone tilted toward the ground.
“I have sad news,” my mom said over FaceTime.
In the frame of my screen I recognized Skittles, our miniature horse, who also served as equine therapy for my thirteen-year-old brother, Gavin. A companion, for well past a decade. Skittles laid on his right side, salt-colored bangs spilling over his eyes, speckled gray body cemented to the ground.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know,” she said, teetering words. “He can’t walk. The vet is on his way.”
Through the screen, one of my younger sisters, Sydney, comforted him, looping her hand back and forth over the arch of his back. Rhythm, of love. She had dragged his three-hundred-pound body out of the stall with a piece of cardboard. Skittles must have fallen, they thought. Something neurological. A disc disjointed in his back, leaving legs dangling, useless.
My mom wiped her nose with the sleeve of an old college sweatshirt. “He’s so confused. He keeps looking at his legs, like he’s trying to tell them why aren’t you working.”
“Can I see his face?” I asked, gently. I told him I loved him, he was a good boy, a mighty tiny horse. What else was there to say? The words were hollow, spewed over pixels. But I had nothing. Skittles, like myself, like the world, frozen, living in stopped time.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I wish I was there.” But I was a thousand miles away, in the middle of a panicky pandemic. All I had was this screen.
Skittles’ immobility teetered me to Gavin, who displayed similar frustration when he wanted to move his legs and couldn’t. My brother was born with a rare illness that left him nonverbal, living with quadriplegia. The parallel of Skittles being unable to walk while thinking of my brother was like a wave pushing me under. The air around, heavy and wet.
“I’ll call you back after the vet gets here,” she said.
Skittles first arrived at our home as a small dose of wonder. A friend for hope, for my brother to live past what doctors expected him to live, age ten. A horse my mom could hoist Gavin’s body on, give my brother the feeling of riding, floating, freedom.
I remember the first time I saw the pair. Gavin’s smile pulled open like a Reese’s Cup, his favorite candy. My mom’s tanned tough hands pressed gently against my toddler brother’s small waist, acting as her son’s core strength. Skittles, bumping the ground for grass to nibble, as he slowly meandered through the yard.
An hour later, the call came while I was cooking a sad box of Kraft Mac n Cheese. I held the phone in front of my face, to catch my mom’s expression.
“It’s over,” she said. Her skin, patched red. “He’s gone.”
“He was never going to walk again?”
“No,” she said. “And he was peeing himself at the end.”
Life seemed to behave this way. A brushstroke of light, a dawn, a fall, and life tilted. I pictured the last time I saw Skittles in person, the color of the moon. Not the color of the rainbow.
The last time I saw him, he was fine. Moseying across the yard, swishing his tail in the flight path of scissoring sparrows. Gavin stood in his blue walker, close by. He didn’t ride him as much as a teenager, but he enjoyed the tiny horse’s company. But often, in the grass, Gavin’s wheels would get stuck between dirt and decay. And this last time at home, the wheels locked. His feet stuck beneath him, knees pulsing, mouth moaning, eyes scanning. I noticed, and ran over to push him out. An exhale, release, from a panic I’d seen all too much. Why aren’t you working.
The time capsule of memory pricked me as I stood in my kitchen alone. In a strange twist of thought, I wished Skittles could have had a special horse walker—like Gavin—instead of the blue death goo the vet injected into his bloodstream. The blue that stole breath, second chances. And if both found themselves stuck in spring mulch, someone could push them out, free. He and Gavin could have had matching blue walkers for legs that needed extra support, chasing the last hour of sun.
