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fistlike holes where light fixtures are supposed to be, and the stairway is just raw wood and open to the kitchen. The house has changed its olden voice, and sound echoes differently now from room to room and floor to floor. Something feels off, but maybe what I heard was just a sheet of drywall stored somewhere, perhaps leaned against the basement wall, falling to the floor.
    It’s a muggy night, I’ve left the windows open, and just when I think I either imagined the sound or that even if I didn’t it isn’t anything to worry about, I hear sirens on the road. They’re close, and so I walk outside in my nightgown to see what brought them here.
    The details of the next several minutes blur. Do I hear or see the sheriff’s car park in front of my house? I’m not sure, it just isn’t there, and then in another glance it is. I might run outside, straight to the side of the road, or maybe I just walk, still hopeful this is someone else’s nightmare.
    My next memory is a well-defined one, though, even if I wish it weren’t. Blue and red lights are blinking on the bare skin of my arms as I sit cross-legged in the grass between the pasture and the road. There’s a lawman standing up next to his car, door flung open, talking on his car radio.
    My nightgown sticks to my thighs and my horse Major’s head is in my lap.
    He’s lying by the side of the road next to me, groaning, and I am kissing his velvet nose, and even though it is a suffocating and humid night in August, I can’t stop shivering.
    And at first, I don’t know anything. Not how to breathe, not how to relax my throat so the scream can get out, not what just happened, or why, or who called the police.
    And I actually try to ask. I try to ask who called them, as if this were somehow important, but I feel my whole body shake, and I gag on the metal smell of all that blood as it pumps down my shins, and I can’t get the words out.
    I press my forehead to my horse’s white blaze instead, bury my mouth against bone and hair, and his last-ever gesture to me isn’t a nicker or a head shake or a tail swish, it’s just to muffle my sobs with his wide neck.
    Major is dying, my dream of horses is dying, or I am dying, or maybe all three.
    And it is a single line of poetry I remember at this wrong moment thatsaves me, just, from that death blow: “First I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.”
    A horse’s head is heavy, but I focus on this one harmless line of words instead of thinking about the weight, instead of petting his Roman nose, the one that the horse trader said was a flaw but that I fell instantly in love with after just one test ride around the arena. I focus on that line instead of the intelligent face of his that I attached to in an instant, handing over the birthday money my mother gave me to buy him, more than thirty years after I first asked her for a horse.
    And I am watching all this from way high up, as if I were actually on the moon instead of seeing a crescent of it reflected in Major’s wide-open eye. As if I were floating and not sitting here next to my horse and holding him while he dies. Because up here, I can just flick that line of poetry straight down to some otherwoman and some other horse like a lead rope tossed out for a last-second rescue.
    But now is not the time for poetry, or the time for rescue, either. Now is the time for this woman to put her girlish dreams aside. For her to realize that the sound that woke her up was real. The copper smell of blood soaking my nightgown is real, and the police are real, and the impact was real, too. As real as the front of a truck connecting with the broad side of horseflesh at, the sheriff says, a reasonably high rate of speed.
    And for the first time I notice two people sitting in the front seat of a smashed-up truck, staring straight ahead, and the sheriff puts his hand on my shoulder and says not to worry any, because the people are badly shaken