Firehorse by Diane Lee Wilson

Author:Diane Lee Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Published: 2006-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

ALL THAT NIGHT THE STORM TOSSED WAVE AFTER CRASHING wave onto my room. Screeching winds shook the very nails from the roof’s shingles. An unearthly thunder rattled the beams. Twisting with pain—and guilt—I heard the violence as God’s anger at me: for reworking the scene in the Garden, for daring to think that I could reach beyond my grasp, for listening to that wild-eyed woman and thrilling to her defiant words. The hour of judgment had come—my hour, anyway—just as Grandmother had foretold. And it had come in both fire and fury. Rachel, what have you done f

The torment was nearly unbearable. The bandages that wrapped my hands and forearms only trapped the fire closer to my skin. Holding my arms as still as I could, I kicked and kicked and kicked at the pain. How was I going to survive this? What was going to happen to me?

Sometime during that nightmare the doctor arrived to examine my burns and to spoon a heavy dose of laudanum into me. I remember he looked at Mother and shook his head. I couldn’t focus my eyes. Was that a Bible he was holding? Was I dying? Lightning flashed through the room and he was gone, though Mother was still floating in the background. She slipped her hands beneath me and somehow lifted me up and I was as light as a feather. Murmuring words I couldn’t understand, she smoothed my pillow and gently laid me back onto it. When she let go, I fell into a sea of bedlam. Raggedy shadows seemed to dance across my ceiling, laughing. Painfully bright lights taunted me, then fled. Even as the medicine dragged me into a stupor, my arms stung like the skin was being stripped from them at that very instant; and I remembered those poor foxes back in Wesleydale, their skins stretched across the barn wall—testament to the awful price paid for crossing boundaries. And I had crossed into Mr. Jude’s garden and something about that made me indecent and maybe even evil, too, because I was always galloping headlong down a path of my own making when everyone else was content to travel the one already paved. And I missed Peaches. And I still wanted to heal horses; I didn’t care about the cost. I wanted to give them life. You’re not God boomed a voice in my head at the same instant that thunder boomed above, and I didn’t know if it was Father or Mother or God Himself who had spoken. Rachel, what have you done?

Gradually the noises scattered, like guests leaving a party and carrying their words and laughter off into the night, leaving me in an empty room with all the doors and windows shut fast, so deaf that there must have been cotton stuffed in my ears. Never had I felt so abandoned.

The laudanum drugged me into a dreamless sleep. As if I was no longer part of my own body, I watched myself floating and flailing and floating again through a hot, airless void, trying to run, but not going anywhere at all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.