The Horse Show

Constantly near you, I never in my entire

sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday

or half so well. We talked. you were never

so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies

of place and time. We talked of ourselves,

intimately, a thing never heard between us.

How long have we waited? almost a hundred years.

You said, Unless there is some spark, some

spirit we keep within ourselves, a life, a

continuing life's impossible-and it is all

we have. There is no other life, only the one.

The world of the spirits that come afterward

is the same as our own, just like you sitting

there they come and talk to me, just the same.

They come to bother us. Why? I said. I don't

know. Perhaps to find out what we are doing.

Jealous, do you think? I don't know. I

don't know why they should want to come back.

I was reading about some men who had been

buried under a mountain, I said to her, and

one of them came back after two months,

digging himself out. It was in Switzerland,

you remember? Of course I remember. The

villagers tho't it was a ghost coming down

to complain. They were frightened. They

do come, she said, what you call

my "visions." I talk to them just as I

am talking to you. I see them plainly.

Oh if I could only read! You don't know

what adjustments I have made. All

I can do is to try to live over again

what I knew when your brother and you

were children-but I can't always succeed.

Tell me about the horse show. I have

been waiting all week to hear about it.

Mother darling, I wasn't able to get away.

Oh that's too bad. It was just a show;

they make the horses walk up and down

to judge them by their form. Oh is that

all? I tho't it was something else. Oh

they jump and run too. I wish you had been

there, I was so interested to hear about it.