Nithing – by Clayton O’Toole
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Nithing, noun: a Germanic Pagan curse comprising a wooden pole adorned with the head of a horse.
The man did what he could. At first he’d sorted emails, which came thick and fast and felt like he was clearing heavy snow, but had dried eventually to nothing. He made himself coffee. He fed the horse. When he found himself awake with the greying sky he would trudge through dew-heavy grass to the paddock and fill the creature’s trough with barley, oats and millet. The horse would rouse and trot over, blinking early morning from its eyes, or else would lie asleep and let the oats go wet in the pre-dawn air.
He longed for the distraction of the workplace but could no longer believe in the importance of what he did there, and being there and devoting that time would feel like a lie he was no longer comfortable telling.
He lived in the inert dark between night and early morning. Things that had been snug in the afternoon light were cold to him now. The house was a void corralled by clean, white, modern lines. There was furniture; a thin TV. Nooks clung in clusters to the walls, filled with picture frames and souvenirs and little baked-clay monsters.
From the kitchen you could see the paddock. From the table you could see the paddock. From the wrong end of the lounge room you could see the paddock.
The house once had two bedrooms and now had lots of closed doors and the man slept on the couch. He found it easier to fall asleep in the laptop’s indifferent glow, or bore his focus into the TV until exhaustion overtook him. From one end of the couch he could see out a glass door, into darkness, toward the paddock. Sometimes when he dozed the afternoon sun would dapple his eyelids and he’d dream of a home filled up and brought alive by something warm and lasting. Sometimes when he woke in daylight the horse was across the drive, hanging its heavy head over the wooden fence, staring dead at him.
*
Noon, the sun high overhead and bright, and the man stood and brushed the horse’s coat. This was part of caring for a horse. The dark hair glistened beneath his hand like a moonlit pool. All the Earth was quiet but for insect buzz from trees at the paddock’s edge, and it occurred to him as he brushed that maybe we aren’t so different since he felt sometimes as though he had no say over his own actions or indeed his life at all – no intent or agency or opinion about anything, like he only moved on instinct in response to stimuli – which was chiefly his opinion of the horse.
Though he was not at all certain of that. He was not at all certain and he stopped brushing and he left.
*
Night, and he found himself before the kitchen window. Out there in darkness, inexplicably, the horse was awake and standing, its black fur shining like polish in the window’s aura. Did the same thought rob them both of sleep? Did the creature understand what it had done? He tried to read emotion in its face, to glean an answer from its wide, dull eyes.
He did not know what he wanted. If he saw remorse in those eyes, if it could feel such things at all, then why not malice?
“If he saw remorse in those eyes, if it could feel such things at all, then why not malice?”
The man sat at the table, held captive by the horse brush. He stared at it and out the other side. The muscles of his jaw worked as he was held there – clenching, releasing, clenching and releasing as if he were chewing. Like big teeth grinding grass.
He felt like he himself were being chewed. This feeling had been intensifying for he couldn’t say how long, compacting him into a tiny ball lumped and imprinted with the dents of giant molars. Each moment further crumpled and compressed him. He could feel his capillaries as they were squeezed beneath the huge, flat teeth; his vessels, flattened and collapsing in his flesh, began to leak thin streams which coalesced and bubbled from his pores, then ran in rivulets and cooled into a film, layer on layer of which became a skin that thickened on his surface, red and slick and growing dense, locking him in place and sealing up his mouth until he jolted up and grabbed the brush and slid aside the door.
Gravel jabbed his feet, and damp grass at the paddock’s edge soaked his trousers. On reaching the fence he leaned out and whistled, two fingers in his mouth, arching his body out above the rail. He flicked his head about, eyes and ears scanning for movement. Here, boy! he chirped. It sounded friendly. After a pause he whistled again, louder, twice in a row, and hammered on the fence with his palm. Come and get a brush now, come on! and his voice was high as he swung the brush around. He could only see so much of the field, illuminated by the porch light and his own bleary vision. The edges were lost to shadow.
He whistled again, said here boy, come on, over here, whistled, hammered, whistled, hammered, screamed. He knew it was out there on the edges, cowering. He could feel it. He could smell the fucking thing.
The man bruised his knuckles on the fence. He pitched the brush into the field.
Bastard, he roared into the blackness, Bastard! and he kicked a post.
He returned to the kitchen twice. Boiling with the need to do violence, he found his hands on the mug drawer and he rattled and wrenched and yanked it out, growling. He marched to the paddock fence and hurled its contents to the darkness. Have a drink! he yelled, Come and get a drink! Each throw made a thud or a crash and with each he cursed the horse, the coward horse out there in the night. But this achieved nothing and he ran out of mugs and stood there, bolted to the ground, crunching under molars, compressing into nothing, until the anger met itself and sealed shut and swallowed and replaced him.
The second time he went into the kitchen, he came out with a knife.
Clenching, releasing, clenching and releasing, he stalked across the drive. His knuckles were white on the handle, the blade serrated and cruel. It was a knife made for cutting meat. He pushed himself through the gap in the fence, stiff and ungainly with lost sleep, and stumbled onto grass.
He didn’t bother calling. He stalked along one wide sweep of fence then back up toward the other. Here and there he passed a mug in pieces on the grass. Moving methodically left to right, corralling his quarry out among the shadows, he left the light behind him. The damp grass and soil tried to suck him in and halt his descent into the paddock’s depths, but he waded out and into darkness.
The night air was thick and oppressive, overstuffed with fog and pregnant with a heady gravity. It pushed in at all sides, on the temples and upon the senses, forcing thoughts to squeeze themselves through corridors burdened and compressed. Every movement was laboured, assaulted, weighted down by the pressure of the air.
Somewhere in that void as black as space the man halted, huffing. Every time he breathed he was intoxicated by the scent of damp hide. He felt the night undulate with movement. The hairs of his forearms prickled with proximity. A silent bulk passed him like a plague ship – a half-seen flash of coat, sleek and black as oil. A lack of empty space, a pressing on the senses, close enough to feel, a giant ghost, a revenant, a curse, orbiting around him in the blackness. Silently. Just beyond his reach.
“A silent bulk passed him like a plague ship – a half-seen flash of coat, sleek and black as oil. A lack of empty space, a pressing on the senses, close enough to feel, a giant ghost, a revenant, a curse, orbiting around him in the blackness. Silently. Just beyond his reach.”
He squeezed the knife. The beast was taunting him, playing around him, dancing where he couldn’t touch it. One moment here then melting back to nothing, looming like a phantom from the mist and rolling out of sight. It thought it could outplay him. It couldn’t. He just had to think how it thinks; he just had to think like a fucking murderer.
He lunged. The steak knife buried to the hilt in air, rending a ragged gash in nothing but the mist. He leapt again, dug it into nothing, leapt once more. With every gouge the creature parted like a wraith and slid away, pausing only long enough to goad him. He could feel in his soul how the dagger would shudder, the vibrations up his arm when the blade gouged bone, sawed through thick skin, rent pink flesh apart and made a bloody mess of it. He could smell the gouts of blood upon the earth and feel its smoking mask upon his face. He stabbed it. Air. He stabbed it. Smoke. He stabbed it, stabbed it, stabbed it. Mist.
Whirling, furious, choking on air, growling in frustration, the man’s eye caught the pinprick light of the distant house and there, silhouetted, unmistakable, stood the horse. The man’s brain flicked off like a switch.
He ran. His legs burned. The knife in his hand grew out from the bones of his arm, a shining, crooked claw, a shard of bone broken and exposed, and he shot from darkness into light and dived into the creature’s shadow.
*
Everything went upside-down. The ground buckled, bucked and tilted up and threw him like a ragdoll. For a maniac second he thought a nail hammered through his foot had pinned it to the earth. Where his body met the ground it tore up grass, and clods of earth, and tumbled. Where he came to a stop he writhed, squealing like a kicked dog, howling with confusion and rage, doubled up, sucking air and clutching at his searing foot. He contorted himself to find the pain, and when he saw his sole, he froze.
Anger sloughed off him like a shed skin. It fell limp around him on the grass in folds and drifts and bunches; nothing more than a cold film, limpid in the white light of the porch lamp. The dry meat in the middle was composed of shame and sorrow.
Wincing, he pried from his sole the fragment of a coffee mug.
Indifferent to his bleeding foot he brought the fragment to his face. He stared at it and into it, and through it into somewhere else entirely. Gradually, against his will, he compacted in upon himself and began to cry. He pushed the fragment to his chest and whispered I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Cautiously, the horse approached and touched its snout against the man’s shoulder. The nose was huge and warm and wet and soft like velvet, the pressure tentative but insistent, so that its gentle nuzzle seemed almost to be saying something.
He wished that it could say I’m sorry.
*
Daylight found him in his bed. His pants were damp and muddy, and stained with blood and grass. He was sore all over, his eyes were raw and grainy, and one hand was twisted in a death grip in his sheet. His foot hurt.
He clambered from the bedroom and limped down the hall and out into the paddock. It was late in the morning for breakfast. He limped to the shed and limped to the trough. As he hefted the sack to the feed tray, the horse trotted up and nudged him gently with its snout. He stepped back and watched it eat.
After some time, he limped off into the field and came back with a brush.
He picked up bits of mugs until the sun had nearly burned away the morning. He showered, and he cleaned and dressed his wound.
As the kettle boiled, he stood and looked out into the paddock. The trough and horse were out of view; from here it was an empty field, glowing in the midday sun. He stood a long time. He was looking for somebody; he could almost see them out there, in the sunlight and the ring of golden grass. ▼
Image: Lara Baeriswyl
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