The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

I am about to slip up the attic steps back to my room, but I get an odd feeling, like something isn’t quite right. Someone is banging around downstairs in the kitchen. Sister Constance? But she leaves on Sunday afternoons to help

the priest in Wick administer last rites to the townspeople who are dying of illness or old age. Then there are quick footsteps, and it’s all I can do to jump into the linen closet and hide before both Sisters come striding down the hall.

“It started an hour ago,” Sister Mary Grace says. “She’s burning up.”

I peek through the closet keyhole. Sister Constance is lugging a steaming copper pot with the handle wrapped in a towel. They open the door to Anna’s room. The red ticket flutters in the gust and then falls down slowly, like a feather, and settles in the middle of the hallway.

I close my eyes.

I want to tell myself that I saw wrong. That it wasn’t Anna’s room, but Benny’s, or anyone else’s. But when I open my eyes, the door to Anna’s room is still ajar.

I push my way out of the closet and walk toward the door with heavy steps. Clomp, clomp, like the clodding of a horse, except my boots make little noise on the hard floors. Dr. Turner’s voice comes through the crack. He is giving Sister Constance orders. More coughing comes, but that can’t be from Anna. Anna’s coughs are quiet and ladylike, even when she is doubled over. This sounds like a soul being ripped apart.

Something crunches under my foot. The red ticket. The glue is still tacky, and it sticks to the sole of my boot and I start to panic, trying uselessly to kick it away.

“Emmaline.” A voice whispers harshly at me from the stairs. Benny sticks out his pinched face, shadows cast over his eyes. “Get back to your room.”

“You don’t tell me what to do,” I say. He acts like Anna belongs to him as much as she does to me, just because she is kind to him, but she can’t possibly matter to him the same way. Anna and I, we are like sisters.

Through the crack in Anna’s door, I can see the back of Dr. Turner’s white coat. Sister Mary Grace, dropping cloths in the steaming copper pot. More coughs, and I flinch.

I push open the door just a tiny, unnoticeable inch. Dr. Turner moves aside to gather his stethoscope, and I get a clear view. It is Anna. Her nightgown. Her light brown curls so like Marjorie’s, though they are now soaked with sweat. Her face, though it is missing something. Her eyes are too dull.

All the sheets around her are soaked in blood.

“The morphine, Sister,” Dr. Turner says. She passes him a needle, and he sticks it into a bare patch of Anna’s skin, and then presses his stethoscope to her chest.

“It’s too late. The lung has collapsed,” he says.

Sister Mary Grace makes the sign of the cross.

I can see Anna’s dresser mirror from here. There are winged horses in the reflection of her window. Their muzzles are pressed against the glass. They are watching. They are waiting.

I push the door open wider, and it catches Dr. Turner’s attention. He sees my reflection in the mirror and spins. The Sisters look up as well.

“Emmaline! You aren’t to be here!” Sister Constance says.

I clutch the brass doorknob, hard. “What’s going to happen to Anna?”

Sister Constance comes striding toward me. “To your room, young lady.”

But as she reaches for me, I dart under her arm and sprint for the bed. Anna’s room isn’t big, even though it was once fit for a princess, and I’m able to grab the bedpost and jump on the mattress before they can stop me.

“Anna!” I cry.

I’ve never seen her face so pale. She reaches out an arm that is more bone than girl, and ruffles my tufts of hair.

“Emmaline.”

Her voice is so weak that it breaks on the sound of my name. A sob comes out of my throat, and I crawl closer, until I can wrap my arms around her. “Anna, you’ll get better. You’ll be fine.”

She is warm. Too warm. There is something inside her moving too fast, burning through everything she has.

“Em, I’m sorry I never saw your winged horses. I wanted to see them so badly. I kept looking at the mirrors. I did. But I never saw them….”

She presses her cheek against mine.

She is fire. She is life. She is sickness.