Blue Horse Dreaming by Melanie Wallace

Author:Melanie Wallace [Wallace, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59692-872-5
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2003-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

She does not resist when he tries awkwardly to wash her face, her hands and wrists, with a wet bandana. At first his attempts serve little purpose but to smear the dirt, but Cutter patiently wipes Abigail Buwell’s face again, removing layers of caked grime, rinses and wrings the piece of cloth. He separates her long fingers, traces their outlines, strokes the length of her neck once more. A rivulet of mud streams down her throat, streaks below her clavicle. The pulse of blood in a vein arrests him, and Cutter stares a long time at it, then begins again. He daubs at her without a practiced hand, thinks enviously of how simply, how intimately, a cat cleans its young, realizes how inept he is. At no time does Abigail Buwell look at him, not even when he turns his attention to the infant and passes the cold, wet cloth over its bluish skin. He thinks to wrap the babe in something, but he has nothing save a blanket soiled with the sweat of his unwashed body.

He brings the blanket, and a piece of hardtack, but she pushes the blanket away and turns her head from him, clenching her jaw. He leaves the hardtack beside her. She closes her eyes, resting her head against the wall, and does not open them to watch him undress, standing away from her in the inner room, unhitching his suspenders, removing his shirt, his boots, his pants, all but the stained piece of long underwear that conceals his thin thighs, sagging buttocks, hollowing chest. His flesh itches and he resists the urge to scratch himself raw, instead turns and lies on his blanketless bed and tries to imagine her breathing, the rise and fall of her breasts. An intense exhaustion floods through him, as palpable as the cold. He finds it impossible to turn over his outstretched hands; though he struggles with this stasis, not unlike some sudden paralysis, he feels himself yielding to it, for Abigail Buwell’s presence, he somehow trusts, will keep the boy at bay. When Cutter finally sleeps, he succumbs to the slumber of the dead.

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