What if shit creek has an even shittier shore?

My heels sunk slowly into the cold clay ground by the riverbed. The night was warm and the air humid as it usually was during the Nebraska summer. I was back home for the week. I hadn’t known we were going to the water. I was dressed for the nighttime outdoor barbeque we had wandered away from. I liked the way my legs looked in my cut-offs and platform sandals. I didn’t like the way they were going to look tomorrow covered with mosquito bites and scrapes from falling over a log. I don’t remember whose idea it was to walk down to the river, but as soon as I heard the suggestion I was game. The Missouri serves as the dividing line between Nebraska and Iowa. Across the water we could see the riverboat gambling of Council Bluffs. Shining beacons on the water, lights still aglow at 2 am, the only place in the state where the lights were bright enough of drown out a few of the stars, though most still shone bright. On our side of the water there was just railroad tracks and gravel. Not easy negotiation in high heels.

My company was a few of the men from the party. I remembered them from when I was younger, still coming up in the scene in Lincoln. Several years older than me, a few of them had now gotten married, one was even a father. Last I’d seen of them they’d been the 20-somethings to my high school kid. Hosts of the parties where we’d drink their beer and flirt our way into weed. Some of them now lived in Omaha, others, like me, had made the 50-minute drive to come to this annual gathering in our friend’s back yard. He’d roasted an entire pig which we picked apart with our hands. Only the one closest to my age, two years older, recognized me and knew me by name. A couple others remembered me after some brief memory jogging, others had no clue as to who I was or had been. I was fine with this.

I didn’t engage in the conversation much except for with the one whom I’d actually known growing up. I preferred to listen. They bitched about their wives, their car payments, their mortgages, their evenutal families, their non-existent children, their jobs, their lives. I sat quietly on the log I’d previously tripped over 6-years younger and a world away. If I’d stayed one of these men could have been my husband, or in a few years one like them would be. I’d be the wife back in Lincoln annoyed that my husband had gotten too drunk to make the drive back to town and was crashing without me in the bigger city tonight. Maybe I’d be at home alone with my 1-year-old daughter or maybe I’d be one of the ones without a child yet.

When we’d exhausted our trek to the river’s edge we hiked over the railroad tracks and back up the hill. The youngest who’d remembered me held back and asked, “Do you want to see the pony?”
“Pony?”
“The neighbors here have a pony. It lives in their front yard along with a couple of ducks. It paces back and forth grazing all day and night although there isn’t much grass left. Come, it’s better if I show you.”

He took my hand and walked me down a side street, turning a few unfamiliar corners in the sleeping residential neighborhood until we reached a house with a barren lawn surrounded by a wooden fence.

“There,” he whispered reverently. “Do you see it?”
And there it was, glowing in the moonlight. A shaggy brown pony standing in the dusty yard. It walked up to the fence as we approached, looked at us solemnly out of it’s big black eyes, then reached its head over the fence trying to reach the few strands of tall grass it hadn’t decimated.
“Can it touch it?” I asked.
“It may bite you, it’s kind of an asshole. Just be careful.”

I slowly reached out. The pony, distracted from its munching, and raised its head to meet my extended hand. I petted its matted mane and it grunted, making soft snuffling sounds. I leaned my head forward, remembering the Shetland ponies of my youngest days onto the horses I’d communed with in later elementary school. Preschool in the country, summer camp at the farm. I rested my forward against the pony’s and it let out a big sigh of hot air from its huge nostrils. The warm flat forehead was comforting and familiar. I closed my eyes and remembered the smell of hay and manure from the barns of my childhood. The sweet stink of the horses coupled with the leather as we strapped the saddles on before we’d ride every morning. I felt a tug at my scalp and realized the pony was trying to eat my hair.

The boy laughed. Communion time was over. The pony, annoyed my hair was out of reach, thrust its head forward and tried to gnaw on a sleeve of the sweatshirt tied round my waist. I pulled away. Angry at my refusal it snorted at me, backed away from the fence and broke into a trot doing laps around the yard working itself into a fury, leaving me standing hair damp from pony spit.
“Oh no, you’ve been rejected.”
“You were right, that pony really is an asshole.”