WINTER ' FOURTEEN
A rusty Socony emblem ornamented the side of a friendly barn in the island village of Bright Harbor
where waves kissed the seaweed shores with the passion of a promise. A single railroad spike pivoted
through the horse’s back on that metal sign so whenever the wind gusted in from the east, sneaking
underneath the steel, the horse reared in place, surging forward, never gaining, forever pinned to a barn
which offered him no shelter. Every day Vera waved gaily at the horse on her way to school and every
day the horse pranced back in answer. She asked her grandfather what it meant, the red horse with the
wings, and when he told her the story of Pegasus, she said, “That’s what I’ll name my golden horse. He
is Pegasus. He can fly. He don’t need no wings.” The old man smiled and corrected her grammar.
The enchanted paths of fairy tale islands can twist and turn and often darkness falls too early. A
hurricane of remarkable ferocity ripped the metal horse free from his barn, and he sailed through the
gusts to the open ocean, lost forever, drifting on the outgoing tide. The same ill wind, a rain-slicked road,
a hair-pin curve, a washed-out bridge, and Vera suddenly lost her human family as well. Only she and
her grandfather remained.
The accident aged him from vigorous to elderly before his time, and he shrank to no more than a
husk, fishing by day, mechanically placing supper on the table by night, attending to life by rote. Without
womanly attention, Vera’s clothes grew disheveled and her braids flopped undone in stringy abandon
on her hunched shoulders. Rather than a place of friendship and learning, for her the island school
became merely a place to be endured, and she increasingly withdrew into the magic of her daydreams.
Living in a house crammed with books and chatting with the imaginary friends on the pages set the little
girl still further apart. Neighbors were sparse in Bright Harbor, surrounded on all sides by inlets, outlets,
and open ocean. When humans huddle together like seals on a rock, hostilities can inbreed and what
may pass for civility masks core-deep animosity. “She’s right peculiar, that one,” they all said. “Still, it’s
a shame,” they all muttered. “But what can you do?” They all shook their heads and went about their
business.
Vera climbed an oak tree with a book in her teeth, squinted down through the leaves at the life
passing below her and pretended not to care. Other girls giggled and held hands as they walked, and she
yearned to pelt them with acorns, but they continued unmolested on their way to birthday parties and
sleepovers and those things that were shared. She perched on a sun-warmed granite ledge overlooking
the ocean, and spread books around her like friends at a picnic. She lay spread-eagled on her back in the
field and talked to the shapes hidden within the cumulous. In the evenings from the mantel Pegasus and
the other horses watched her read and dream, and their shadows grew huge on the opposite wall, and
when she flickered the lamp, they galloped. Smoke from the old man’s pipe circled, crawled its applescented self through the light, and caressed the shadows of the horses on the wall, clouds for them to
climb. It seemed a simple childhood, yet Vera was not a simple child. Her mind churned with mythology
and metaphor and she would scan the distant horizon like a shipwrecked sailor to discover angels and
horses within the fog. Winged beings of deliverance.
When the rifts in his heart ultimately cracked through to a fatal fault, the old man passed on a rather
prosperous chuck of this world to Vera, so she continued to study and survive in the book-filled house
on the bluff beside the sunlit fields and shared her dreams with Pegasus. On those rare social occasions
when she attended church, a town meeting, a funeral, Vera would slink deeper into the shadows, a
wallflower at a perennial eighth-grade dance whose homemade dress whimpered of poverty and innocence.
A child whose scrubbed face eagerly awaited life while stinging from its slap. Only the shadows were
The Linnet's Wings