Lesley Livingston: Wondrous Strange

Kelley leaned her head against the tiled wall. At least she hadn’t actually drowned. What was that old cliché? Right: “Fortune favors the foolish.” Stupid horse. She hoped it had found its way home. With the water starting to run lukewarm, Kelley reluctantly turned off the taps and slid aside the shower curtain.

And screamed.

The “stupid horse” was standing right in front of her, filling almost every available inch of her tiny bathroom with its big, lanky frame. The horse’s back feet-in fact its entire back half-was still outside, as it stood half in her bathroom, half out on the landing of the fire escape. Kelley could see steam rising up from the horse, dissipating into the cold night air. It whickered softly and pushed at her shoulder with its velvet muzzle.

Kelley scrambled for something to cover herself and tried not to panic.

When she’d hoped that the creature had found its way home, Kelley hadn’t meant her home! She wrapped herself in a towel and edged around the horse, out of the little room. As soon as she could, she shut the door with a bang and leaned against it, her heart pounding.

This is impossible , she thought. This is not happening .

She was imagining things. She had brain freeze. Über brain freeze-not just the kind you got from drinking a Slurpee too fast. No. The kind that you got from jumping into a lake in late October. The kind that made you hallucinate wildly.

The horse whinnied softly.

“Stop that!” Kelley clapped her hands over her ears. “You’re not real! I can’t hear you because you’re not real!”

There was another little burble of equine noise from behind the door, followed by shuffling and thumping sounds. Then nothing. Kelley sank down to the floor and sat with her back to the door. This really wasn’t happening. Because if it was happening, Kelley was in for a world of trouble.

Her roommate was going to kill her. Or kick her out.

Oh, God-if Tyff kicked her out, she might have to move back home! It wasn’t as if her aunt Emma had wanted Kelley to move to New York in the first place, and it was only the fact that Kelley’d found such a great place to stay that made her agree. Tyff Meyers was a model-more than a little high-strung-and Kelley could recall the wording of her craigslist ad with absolute clarity:

Available to Rent: outrageously expensive, ridiculously tiny room with no view, in Upper East Side walk-up, w/shared kitchen/bath/living. Must be single female. Nonsmoker, nondrinker, nonannoying. No late nights, loud friends, parties, or general weirdness. You must be neat, you must be civilized, and you must not touch my stuff-food and bath products, especially.Interview required. Must answer skill-testing question. Serious inquiries only to: dragonfodder@hotmail.com.

NO CRAZIES. NO PETS.

A horse in the bathroom would pretty much violate both the NO CRAZIES and NO PETS , Kelley thought, still trying desperately not to panic.

She stayed crouched against the door for a long time, her mind racing like a runaway train. This couldn’t possibly be happening. After a long few minutes of silence, she dared to hope her fit of hallucination had run its course.

Then she heard the sound of water running.

Kneeling, she put an eye to the antique keyhole in the door and, feeling dazed, noted that the horse had climbed entirely-impossibly-through the small casement window and was now standing in the tub.

It also seemed to be running itself a bath.

“No, ma’am, I’m not drunk,” Kelley said for the third time.

This, after the eighty-five minutes she had spent trying to get a real person to talk to at NYC Animal Control. “Like I said, he must’ve come up the fire escape-”

The receiver clicked in her ear.

“Hello? Hel lo ?”

Exasperated almost to the point of tears, Kelley hung up the phone and began to pace. Maybe the Animal Control lady was right. Maybe she was drunk. Okay, so she hadn’t had anything to drink, but that made about as much sense as a full-grown horse following her home from Central Park like a lost puppy, climbing up the fire escape, and squeezing itself through a tiny window into her bathroom, didn’t it? She stopped pacing and went to check on it. Still hoping beyond hope that she had , in fact, been hallucinating, she cracked open the door. The horse rolled a big, brown eye at her inquiringly.

Kelley sighed in weary frustration and decided to attempt to physically remove the creature from the tub herself. She tried pushing from behind, pulling from in front, poking, prodding, enticing with a withered carrot she’d found in the back of the refrigerator vegetable drawer…

The horse remained sweet-tempered throughout-and stubborn as a mule.

It- he , she noticed-affectionately snuffled her shoulder, nuzzled at her fingers, and remained entirely disinclined to budge from the half-full tub. Kelley leaned on the edge of the sink and dropped her head into her hands, still dully disbelieving that any of this could actually be happening.

Then she caught a whiff of lavender and jerked her head up to see a glistening white froth swirling around the horse’s legs.

It was only then that Kelley’s state of shock evaporated, and the panic set in for real.

Never mind the fact that there was a horse in her bathtub. The only thing that mattered to Kelley in that particular moment was that the horse had tipped over a bottle of her roommate’s insanely expensive bath oil, emptying its shiny purple contents into the water. The bottle with its elegant gold-lettered label bobbed on the surface.

Tyff was definitely going to kill her.

At around four in the morning, Kelley resigned herself to her fate and went out into the living room to wait for Tyff to come home from her date. At the very least, maybe she could try and get some script work done. But, to top it all off, she couldn’t find her damned script.

The only thing on TV at that time of night was infomercials, so she finally drifted off to sleep on the couch during a sales pitch for “Eighties HIT-SPLOSIONS.” Deep within her sleepy brain, the bubblegum refrains of Wham! twisted and spiraled into minor keys, flowing seamlessly into the darkly alluring music that Kelley had heard as the world had disappeared around her under the waters of the Lake. The music enthralled her, leading her through a series of fantastic, strange dreamscapes.

But when she woke up late the next morning, she couldn’t remember the tune.

Out of this wood do not desire to go …

And I do love thee. …

Green eyes sparkled at him from the shadows beneath the branches of a nightmare forest. Laughter rang in his ears. The drumming of hoofbeats made it seem to him as if his heart would burst.

Love thee …

Long white hands reached out from the darkness, beckoning, and he wanted with all his soul to follow.

Love …

Sonny startled awake as the tree branches, dripping venom, reached out for him.

He sat up in bed in the darkened room and clutched at the ache in the middle of his chest. His head pounded as he got up and threw open the heavy curtains of his bedroom window, wincing at the late-morning light. It was a beautiful day outside. Groaning, he pulled the curtains shut again, plunging the room back into blessed darkness.

A knock on the door startled him. Sonny sensed it was Maddox; he called, “Come in,” and pulled on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

“Afternoon, Sonn-shine,” Maddox greeted him as he stepped over the threshold, his usual easy grin brightening up the room. “Pretty gloomy in here. You just get up?”