stealing a carrot
The dream involved a horse I used to know, a horse that’s dead.

But this was no daydream like I had when I was young, imagining riding away on the back of a strong and gentle creature with big, brown eyes. This was a nightmare.

For all my twenty-eight years, I’d been blessed with deep, sound, dreamless sleep. I know everyone dreams, but I never remembered mine. Not a feeling, not a glimpse, not anything.

Until now.

Wastrel trotted to me out of a bright mist, whole and sound, not all broken and bleeding like the last time I saw him. The big bay snorted and shook his head and nuzzled my side. I could feel his warm breath, the tickle of his whiskers. He didn’t smell like his usual combination of clean wood shavings and liniment; he smelled like heaven.
Who knows what heaven smells like? For some, it might be bacon frying or lilacs, freshly-turned earth or the air on top of a mountain. Wastrel smelled like all those things. So, that’s what heaven smells like.

He danced around me, teasing. I reached and he moved away, just as we had always played together in the paddock before I’d bring him in to work.

He led me to a hillside I didn’t recognize. There was the biggest manure pile I’d ever seen. It didn’t smell like heaven, not at all.

“Yes,” I said, not knowing what I meant, “We’re cleaning it up today.”

He climbed to the top and whinnied, then struck and dug at the heavy pile with his forefoot, spewing wet straw and manure through the crystal air.

I walked toward him, but he began to sink.

“Wastrel, get out of there,” I yelled.

He thrashed with all four legs, called to me in a voice choked with panic. I slid closer, sinking to my knees, my thighs. I couldn’t reach him.

He went under, sucking me down. I grabbed for his mane.

And woke up coughing, the stink of rotten vegetation stuck in my nose and throat. I sat up quickly. Big mistake. I was sleeping on the front seat of my truck and bashed my face on the steering wheel.

I rested my head on the frayed armrest, waiting for my heart rate and breathing to slow, for my stomach to settle. My dog, Noire, a black Lab who was no stranger to her own busy dream world, licked my hand and whimpered. But her commiseration did little to quell the fear still pinging my insides.

Wastrel. I couldn’t have loved him more if he’d been mine. He was my favorite ride ever, and I’ve ridden lots of horses. I have a weird connection with all of them, like our minds meld, but Wastrel and I, well, we could do anything. But he didn’t enjoy competition jumps. A log out on the trail was fine. Point him at a course in a ring, and he balked. Not so observers could see it. Only I knew. I tried to explain to his owner, but he pushed and pushed for the grand-prix prize.

I sat, more carefully this time, rubbed sleep and tears from my eyes, snapped on Noire’s leash, and stepped out into the cool night air of a rest stop somewhere along highway 70 in Illinois. My horse, Cali, moved restlessly in the trailer, picking up on my distress. After letting Noire do her business, and nodding a greeting to an equally sleepless trucker on his way to the toilet, I took the mare out on a lead line to stretch her legs.

My own felt rubbery, like that monster manure pile still had hold of me. If this was what dreaming was like, I could do without it. Cali grazed on the short new grass at the far edge of the rest stop, contended to shore me up. I pressed my nose into her side, breathing in her warmth and hanging on to her aliveness, feeling my body and mind come together, as if part of me was still in that other place and having a hard time finding its way home.

Ten minutes later, we were back on the road, heading west. There’d been no point in trying for more sleep. Nor any in dwelling on the dream. No one could ever figure out what they meant, anyway.

Two hours later, though, the nightmare still had me feeling shaky. Okay, maybe that was the third cup of coffee on an empty stomach. I couldn’t cut loose the images. The feeling of sinking, of losing Wastrel.
Again.

I chalked it up to an unsettled state of mind. I’d been on the road for a couple of days, sleeping in my truck. I was driving to a different state, a new job, a fresh start. I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to moving from the frenzied and prestigious New York show-jumping world to what I suspected would be a mind-numbingly dull and insignificant existence on a farm in Missouri called Winterlight.

Now, I dreaded it