Annika Rose by Cheri Johnson

Author:Cheri Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781636281216
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Annika’s dreams were loud, garish, and uncomfortable, and she got up several times in the night. When she woke the next morning, she was still exhausted and foggy, but she couldn’t sleep. Her nose was clogged, her mouth was dry and tasted terrible. When she finally dragged herself out of her room, her father was not in the trailer. She dressed as quickly as she could and got outside.

There, was the dirt under her feet. With each step, she took a gulp of fresh, damp air. There, was her breathing it: Annika. Annika Rose Rogers. She pronounced her name under her breath.

She had a headache and she felt like crying. She went to clear leaves and sticks out of the ditch that ran down a slope from the rain-swollen horse trough. But when she got there, the job had already been done.

She went to work on the fence. At one point, the sweaty work made her so woozy, she threw up. She dropped to the grass. Two of the big tomcats came to lick up the puke. She petted the less skittish one before shooing them both away.

She saw her father walking from the cow pasture to the horses’ field. There was no use waiting; she sat up, then trailed after him.

He called from a distance that he was going to see about trimming up Sparky. He got the gelding and tied him at the woodhouse. He usually secured him on the west wall of the barn; perhaps the switch would put the horse off guard.

Annika asked him, “Are you sure you don’t want to wait? With your hand.”

He spoke without looking at her. “It’s gotta get done. It’s not bleeding anymore.”

Annika shut the dogs up in the house, even though they had been slopping in the ditch. She didn’t have the heart to tie Tippy up in the barn again. The dog had still been howling when they came home last night.

The sore on Sparky’s leg was healed, but her father spent a longer time than usual talking to him, running his hands firmly, soothingly, over the animal’s body, focusing especially on the legs, reminding him the tender spot was gone and this would not bother him a bit. Before her father went to the barn for his tools, he asked Annika to stand at the horse’s head and keep talking to him. When he came back and pulled out the long file with a dull point on the end, Sparky got jumpy.

Annika worried her father would get kicked in the jaw. It had happened once before. She stroked the horse’s beautiful gray head, which felt like a miracle in her hands. The hint of a hopeful feeling warmed her chest. In fact, this whole scenario seemed miraculous. If she and her father had first run into one another this morning at the breakfast table, or when one of them was coming out of the bathroom, it might have seemed impossible not to talk about the night before, at least to make a plan for talking about it.

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