The Red Rocking Horse

Nobody thought to clean it up.

If we did, it would mean it was broken. It was. It was broken. But there’s no explaining logic to a terrified child. Not even one who’s thirty-seven years old. I was thirty-one at the time. Muddle was thirty-three. I envied her. Thirty-three is the best age in the white room. You get extra food everyday. Nobody knows why. You also get to sleep on the cot with the softest pillows. After thirty-three, nothing good ever happened. Nothing we knew about anyway. Murmur was the thirty-seven year old. The one who couldn’t be reasoned with, but, then again, none of us could be. If it were possible, then one of us would have cleaned up the red rocking horse when it broke.

Instead, we sat in the circle and did our gratitude.

“Air. Food. Beds. Tv. Popcorn. Salt. Salt on the popcorn. Butter on the popcorn. Gray Mother. Gray Father. The walls. The ceiling. The sound of rain outside. The sound of nothing outside when it’s nothing instead of raining. Oxygen. And anything else that’s in air.”

That was usually how the list went unless somebody forgot to mention salt and then we were all nervous for the rest of the night. Gray Mother would come down and sit on the red rocking horse. She’d tell us about the rain outside and how refreshing it was. We’d tell her that she should be sure and bring an umbrella with her when she went out, and she promised she would. None of us had ever seen an umbrella, but we knew what to say about the rain. We did not know what to say when something broke, because nothing ever broke. The tv was replaced every so often when it didn’t work properly, but we took great care of it. Father Gray would always remark that we were the most courteous of girls, and he was so happy that he and Mother had adopted the three of us when we were born. One time, Muddle asked if we were sisters, and Father Gray looked like he was going to put his hands on her. Instead, he began to cry, and Muddle apologized, but it did no good. He left in tears. Shortly after that, Mother came in and lectured us on not upsetting people. What kind of girls were she and Father raising if we went around asking questions that caused such pain?

We never asked questions after that.

Nor did we ride the red rocking horse. That belonged to Mother Gray, and it was in the white room with us to remind us how much she loved us and how, once, she was a child like we were, and that it was possible to always stay a child if you surrounded yourself with things you loved as a child. When we were children, younger children than we are now, we had nothing. So we would always be reminded of being children, because we would always have nothing. And we had Mother and Father Gray, and we would always have them. The red rocking horse was Mother Gray’s prized possession. She loved riding it. Every night, when she came to help us through our nightly suppression of fear, she would sit on the rocking horse, close her eyes, and years would fall off her face and hands. Her slender body would seem to pulse. Yes, she was a grown woman on a small, rocking horse, but it never occurred to us that the little wooden horse could break. We never thought anything so important to someone could be damaged. We had never seen damage. We had only seen malfunction. The tv would flicker, and Father Gray would be in right away telling us not to worry.

And so we didn’t worry.

The red rocking horse broke, because Murmur decided to ride it. We begged her not to, but she told us it was her birthday and she wanted to do something special. She’s a liar, of course. She has no idea when her birthday is. None of us do. When we least expect it, Mother or Father Gray will enter the white room and announce that it was our birthday, and we would get a slice of cake that day. Nobody had come in that day to tell us that it was Murmur’s birthday and, even if they had, that didn’t give her the right to ride the red rocking horse. Muddle tried to physically restrain her, but I held Muddle back, because I was worried about what would happen if the two of them touched. They dislike each other so fervently, I was concerned that any contact between the two of them could result in some kind of chemical explosion. I have trouble with logic as well, as you can probably tell.

Murmur was only on the red rocking horse for a minute or two before it shattered. It split down the middle, and Murmur was sent down to the ground. She could have been hurt, but that wasn’t what distressed me. I knew right away that Mother Gray would never recover from this. It didn’t matter that she’d never spoken explicitly to us about the horse other than to tell us that it was from her childhood and that we must never ride it. I knew--We all knew--that she loved it almost as much as she loved us. When the horse broke, Muddle let out a cry like nothing I’d ever heard. Later, she would tell me that I was the one who let out the cry, and that she was too shocked to make any noise. She could be right. Father Gray says that memory is faulty. That’s why we all think we’re much younger than we are, when really we’re in our mid-thirties. We’re grown women and we can leave the white room anytime we like, but we don’t, because it’s often raining outside, and when it’s nothing outside, the thought of the nothing is even scarier than the rain.

When Father Gray walked into the white room, we were relieved. He could help us decide what to do about the broken rocking horse. He could tell Mother Gray to stay out until it was fixed or cleaned up. He could go get a new red rocking horse that was identical to the broken one so she would never know the difference. We trusted him. He would locate a resolution.

Father Gray spotted the shards right away. The detritus. The red splinters. A snort escaped his nostrils. His chin shook, and the shake reverberated up his scalp and then down his lower back. He lowered himself to his knees as though he was about to list his gratitudes. The air. The popcorn. The salt on the popcorn. Then, from his back pocket, he pulled out what, at first, looked like a small animal. Muddle and Murmur were on opposite sides of the room near their cots. I was next to the wash bucket so I was closest to him. I watched as he put the small animal on his head. I saw him smooth it out so that it began to compliment his face.

It wasn’t an animal. It was simply hair.

Suddenly, where Father Gray had been, there now knelt Mother. He had transformed. How had he done it? Out of his other pocket came the red lipstick Mother Gray always wore. With a trembling hand, she applied the lipstick, smearing a good portion of her bottom lip. Puckering her lips together, it was clear that she wanted to cry, but was barricading back the emotion. I had never seen such a display of nobility.

Once the evolution was complete, Mother Gray stood up and motioned lightly with her right hand to the mess we had all contributed to. Murmur for lying about a birthday and being brash, Muddle for escalating the situation by trying to get physical, and me for allowing the entire thing to transpire. Mother Gray cleared her throat, and said--

“Clean this up.”

With that, she left the room.

She never taught us how to clean.

We had never broken anything until now.