Amadeo
by Kevin McIlvoy
The members of the rescue team already knew the name of the blind old stallion carried into the ocean here. My mother, the bravest of the team, saw Amadeo charge in with no hesitation, and she and the other two figured the wild horse thought he was defending his harem from waves of stallions in tens of thousands. They could hear the horse huff-grunting and screaming, with no idea – with no care – that the rip current had him. He bit at the waves mocking him, crashed his chest against their massive collapsing chests, his front hooves lifting against their pounding white hooves. He wound his neck up like a striking snake would and got the napes of the cresting waves in his teeth and he swallowed and made a furnace-roaring sound so fierce that vapor blazed from his mouth and spouted into the air. The narrow corridor of current pulled them and their rescue buoys out after him. They weren’t lifeguards, you understand, they weren’t a team by any definition. When the three old women surfers saw Amadeo’s mad siege, they rushed to the unmanned rescue shack and of one will and in one wordless pact took what they needed, and not one of them shouted, Wait! or asked, What? or made any plan but to help Amadeo stay alive, to somehow reach the release-point of the rip-suck a thousand feet out where they could swim him parallel to the shore, could use the buoys to turn him like a train at a wheelhouse, and could guide him in the right direction back to shore, onto solid land, and head him far enough up the dunes that he would not return to his ocean of imagined enemies. Careening in rage, he vaulted himself onto a sandbar no bigger than his body. He collapsed there, his soaked mane and tail and hide wearing the dense sand-cloaks that had draped the morning light
Scrath painting by Kevin McIlvoy
inside the current surface. The three fixed their gazes upon each other’s spooked brown eyes and long, toothsome faces. They treaded years of disconnection, loss, and deeper separation at this pipe dream alley 48
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