Kept Animals by Kate Milliken

Author:Kate Milliken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

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Before you shoot a horse, you have to draw an X across their forehead with your eyes. Two lines, each running from one ear to the opposite eye. But when you fire, you aim just slightly above center, to get around the bony ridge of the forehead. When the shot rings out it will echo through the valley, the birds will scatter from the trees, the neighbors pause their work, and the caribou and the coyotes will freeze, ears pricked. It is a silence that is equal parts shock and hope. I’ve been living in that kind of silence for a long time.

Our family has always had secrets: that Mama smoked, that she hid her packs behind the darkroom door, that Grandad took antidepressants, that we sometimes bred grade mares. Even Aunt Joy’s cancer was a kind of secret, another thing we didn’t discuss. The same brand of silence there was about Mama’s being gay and the fact of my father having had to have been someone, once upon a time, somewhere. There’d never been reason for me to suspect that I was named for a dead boy, never any kind of clue, but as Grandad spoke and my eyes grew tired reading the clippings from the newspapers, the magazines, that same uncanny feeling was coming over me, the sense of having known all along.

“I always assumed,” Grandad said, refolding the crease-thinned pages of Sarah Price’s letter, “that this had burned up in the fire, same as everything else.”

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