Pony Rodeo

Jun 13, 2024

A photograph of horse paddocks in the afternoon light with lush grass and vividly green trees beyond.

Dear Friends,

This was meant to be a week off, a postcard week, but I couldn’t miss the invitation

Tara Penry

offered to collectively pay homage to Alice Munro.

Alice Munro, the great Canadian writer of short stories, left the world a month ago on May 13 — there has been an outpouring of affection and admiration since then. How best to join in thanking her for the gift of her work?

Offstage, I’ve been experimenting with more fiction, so it seemed right to make a story for Alice. I couldn’t, in any possible world, imagine writing like Alice Munro, but in a small way I wanted to write something for her, something small, like offering a flower — one to join the other flowers gathering in memorial.

Thank you, Alice.

— Sal

Pony Rodeo

“I don’t know how to do it,” Alice thought, as she looked down at the fabric in her lap. For a moment, she couldn’t even tell where one piece began and one ended. “I need help,” she said to herself, but there was no help at hand.

Alice was sitting on a daybed in a little cabin by the sea. It was afternoon, and the cool wind blew through, moving the curtains and moving against her bare arms. Her dog Sammie lay in the sun at the end of the daybed. It was an ordinary afternoon at the beginning of summer, quiet except for the sound of the waves. Every now and then the dog would lift her head to look out the screen door, then she would rest it again on her front paws.

The afternoon was coming to an end, the vacation was coming to an end. She had just started to feel the new rhythm of being in this place. “I don’t know how,” she said to herself again. She was working on what would be a stuffed horse, a pony, and she wanted to sew it by hand. It shouldn’t be that hard. In her mind there was a perfect pony, all of its proportions graceful and accurate. She had tried to draw it on to the fabric. “This should be funny,” she thought. She imagined standing at the small dining table, marking out the horse shape, laughing at herself where it went wrong. Where, exactly, should the seams go on a horse’s body? There should be music playing, and a tall glass of iced tea, or maybe some rosé, and the fullness of an afternoon that was much like the one before it and the one that would follow. She pictured a set of spoons, nestled into one another, a perfect row.

It was ridiculous to be so worried, so at a loss. It was an imaginary stuffed version of an imaginary pony, made for an imaginary child. It was just something to occupy her time here, a way of going-on-being, not some deity she should tremble before.

Earlier, she had walked up the hill where her street met a bigger street. Beyond was the road where the corral had been. She had turned back, and not gone to see it. The old hand-painted sign had been taken down years ago, the one that had said Pony Rides. The first time she had seen it she had read Pony Rodeo, and fallen instantly in love. The lassos! The barrel-racing ponies! The trampled earth and the smell of grassy manure. There was a joy in the idea of a pony rodeo that made her want to write country music and then dance in front of an audience in boots and a Texas hat.

How long ago was that? She had wanted to get in a car and drive out west. She had wanted to start one new life after another, dozens of them, but it was just a bright flash of a moment.

A dog was barking in the distance and Sammie began to pace the floor. “It’s just a barker,” Alice said to her. She looked back down at the fabric in her lap. The idea of doing what had to be done next irritated her. Why did everything have steps that had to be followed? Outside, the sun was stealing almost imperceptibly across the sky, changing feeling of the light. It was cooler than it had been a half hour ago. The wind was rising. Sammie lay on her favorite towel on the floor, closing her eyes and opening them again. The afternoon, of itself, required nothing.