Author: Greg Buchanan

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be rumpled. It would be difficult to see in this light, though a bulb would be turned on in the hallway. Its strange light would seep under their door, just a bit, suddenly clicking off as he reached out.

He’d feel hair in his hands, coarse and rigid in the dark.

It would feel almost like the hair of a horse’s tail.

It would be his wife’s hair, made from the hair of another. He’d want to stroke it even so, but there was beeping in the cold. Years blurred into years, but the memory hung on. He lost himself in Elizabeth’s time.

They’d bought the wig together, the day after her diagnosis.

It was what people did, when they prepared for the worst.

It had creeped him out, how they had made it from a real person’s donated hair. But she’d wanted something real. She had wanted to feel it was real when she touched her head, she wanted to know someone had helped her, even in this.

And it would be hard, wouldn’t it? She’d kept telling him how hard it would be.

She didn’t want anyone to forget her. That was what she was scared of the most.

She’d known it inevitably happened to everyone.

She hadn’t wanted to die, she’d told him.

They’d get through this together, he’d promised.

He—

He had the memory of hair in his hands, and even when his eye flickered, even as he came back to the world, he could still feel it, still smell a stolen smell.

He woke up.

He was not himself. He’d never been himself.

His eyelid would flicker, sometimes, until the end of all his days.

And he’d smell that hair.

He’d feel it, lying in the dark of his bed. Coiled on a distant farm.

The world was all nightmare, now and always. The room sang with machines. Doctors came into the room. Their mouths moved, and in his confusion Alec realized he could not speak. He had tubes in his nose, in his throat. His arms were dark with welts and scars.

His heart had stopped twenty days ago. It had been healed through the company of strangers. His wife had died once, too.

As they pulled the tubes from Alec’s chest, tears fell from his eyes, but no expression of horror or dread, nothing to indicate true tears or sadness.

So it was only water. It was only skin.

His body would never be what it had once been. He couldn’t breathe.

It was only horses.

He thought of their number. He grasped for their names.

‘We’d like to book you in for counselling.’

The doctor stood by his bed. Time had passed; he wasn’t sure if it was even the same day any more, or if—

‘It says in your file you previously saw a Dr Tillman for a depressive episode a few years back? What we’re going to do here is more of a cognitive behavioural approach. Near-death trauma, losing a loved one, it can take a toll, but—’

What were they talking about?

‘You can frame negative events in a different way,’ the doctor said. ‘It can really help. We may not even need drugs here.’

His eyelid still shook.

He tried to sit up, and the doctor looked away as he did so, as if the motion itself were something private, something embarrassing.

‘Wh—’ Alec swallowed, his throat dry. With difficulty, he went on. ‘What’s wrong?’

The doctor stared at him. ‘Nothing’s changed in your diagnosis.’

‘What diagnosis? I don’t—’

‘You don’t remember? We talked about this.’ The doctor frowned. ‘This isn’t an optimal sign, you know.’

Alec tried. He was trying, but this man – this—

The sun was falling outside. How many days had he lost?

‘My son . . . Where is Simon? Where is my son?’

THE HORSES

HORSE #1: Palomino colouring. Pony.