Creative Non-fiction By Marla Lepore
Summer camp, Mississippi. Muggy torpor. Once again, my parents have checked the permission box on my application in case I want to take horseback riding. I do not want to take horseback riding. Once again, I am at the stables, weighted down in twentieth-century blue jeans, the kind without any spandex or stretch, plopped atop a horse, a horse that smells like manure and earth and horse. This is the kind of heat that squashes your will to live, but not the buzzing things that zizz around my ears and feast on my arms and ankles. We scratch and claw at those bites until they bleed, until the ooze-and-crust forecasts a ticket to the infirmary and a shot of icebox air. A cold so yearned-for you can almost forget the aroma of antiseptics and calamine, hospital.
There is no such reprieve out here. The sun pounds from above, the humidity pulses up from below, and my horse, Rousseau, stands stolid, gathering flies. I am matched with Rosseau because he is an introvert, a dawdler who tends to clop along behind the pack. But on this stifling afternoon, some instinct ignites and we are off, Rousseau yanking me down the trail in a blur of trees. Turbulence throttles my chest as I clench the reins, a whoosh of hot wind and the manic drumbeat of hooves playing backup to the sound of my screaming.
I didn’t sign up for this.
The path beneath us is divoted and knotted, but Rousseau is undeterred. A rush of lush greens and shimmering wood blows past me and over me, everywhere, an abstract acrylic painting better than anything I’ve ever made in arts and crafts. With each footfall and grounding, the dirt kicks up around us in applause, the trees wave us on, and I can hear a chorus of spirits amid the thickets and gusts, they’re unleashing me. This seems to go on and on forever and be over in an instant when Rousseau and I catch the pinpoints of other riders in the clearing ahead, clumped and plodding under the blazing heat.
I am still humming, still vibrating, late that afternoon as I find my place in line among my cabin mates at the canteen, where counselors are peddling Freeze Pops in the shade of the breezeway. A jolt of thunder crackles on the horizon. Around here, an idea of rain is always hovering around. Today, the fat drops will finally break through. A cloud drags its curtain across the sun.
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Marla Lepore is a writer based in Nashville, TN. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Points in Case, Sky Island Review, MIDLVLMAG, and elsewhere. She writes the Muck Rack Daily newsletter, a digest of journalism and media news, and has also contributed to WNYC’s On the Media newsletter. She received a BA in English-Language, Writing, and Rhetoric from Tulane University and completed the Pocket MFA in creative nonfiction. She has also participated in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Colgate Writers’ Conference.