The dark rock was rugged and would scrape bare feet if they ever dared to dance on its surface. In the creases and caverns of the rock, the seawater pooled, and over time grew algae and kelp. It sprouted glutinous leaves and slick bushels. There were places where barnacles exploded from the land, their fungal faces upturned, begging for rays of sunlight to warm them. But wet day after wet day, they were drowned all over again.

There was only a small patch of land that wasn’t rock. Instead, it was soft soil and was where the horses were kept. The family had three, a stallion and two mares, all dark in colour and unfriendly in nature. They would stand in a row near the dishevelled structure that the family called a barn, their black tails swinging in the wind, their heads fixed forward looking out onto the water. They flinched only when the young girl of the island, Gilly, came around to feed them. Even then, they walked in an apathetic gait to the bucket of food that was laid out on the grassy knowe.

The black mare was the tamest but also the slowest. It often trailed behind the other two when it was feeding time. She was Gilly’s favourite, an older horse that always let the girl pat her. Every morning, while the horse ate from the cold metal bucket, the girl would press her head against its body like she was eavesdropping on a conversation lurking behind a door. She never heard much, only waves crashing against the rock in a slow waltz.

At times, she could also hear her father humming in another world away from the barn. His voice scratched like craggy barnacles, and like the voices hidden in the horse, his rough tunes were often drowned out by the roars of the sea. Gilly sung along in a much smoother voice, filling in the notes that she could not hear and adding lyrics that existed only when they left her tongue.

“I should not name you Atlantic, though,” Gilly sung to the horse, “for you are far more tame.”

When the horses finished their feed, she tied their bridles back to the post and dragged the bucket against the side of the barn. Watching the grooves in the tattered barn roof conduct a stream of rainwater, she placed the bucket under the rivers to collect the water for drinking. The horses stood watching her with bored eyes, licking the hay stuck in between their yellow teeth.

When there was enough water, Gilly sat on a rock nearby to watch them. She thought of how they must feel living on the small rock, these creatures with such wild hearts. She did not know much of their past lives, only how they had been purchased by her father in Scotland many years back. She wondered what their life was like before they were taken to the island, imagining their sluggish bodies once abundant with energy, dancing around large pastures, muscular and young spirited. Were they as bored of the rock as she was? With this thought, she skipped inside the house.

“Mum,” Gilly said bursting through the door, “why do we always have to tie up the horses? They won’t go anywhere, let’s let them run.”

Her father, who had stopped singing, scoffed. “There is nowhere to run.”

“I asked mum.”

“She ain’t here. And she don’t make the decisions, anyway.”

Gilly crossed her arms. “I want to take them around the rock tomorrow. I want them to run.”

“I said that there is nowhere to run.”

As she backed away from the kitchen table where her father sat and found her way up to her bedroom, an image in her mind began to form. The few details she knew about his past connected to create a blurry narrative.

She saw him as the young man he once was, living on a farm she knew was owned by her grandparents. She saw her father caring for the horses, taking them out onto the pasture and then locking them away safely in their stalls at night time. She saw him riding them with grace and patting their sides with love. She saw him sitting under a tree with a horse nearby as they watched the sunset colour the grass. She wondered what had changed so much.

* * *

In the belly of the night, Gilly awoke to the waves crashing against the rock. She lay facing the ceiling until what felt like the morning. But morning seemed to never come. When she got up, the house was dark as the sun was still buried deep in the sky. Under her small feet, the floor creaked and crooned as she ran down the staircase.

The old armchair in the corner of the room welcomed her into its grasp. It was tattered just like the rest of the house. Gilly’s father often sat in it and read his books, as the spot had a lovely view of the water during the day. In the night, there was not much to see, but nonetheless, the girl sat and rested her back against the leather cushion. Beside it was a small bookshelf littered with the books the family had brought over. A thick book with shiny bindings lay upside down on the top of the shelf. Its cover was dark, and Gilly had to lift it to the moonlight to read its print. It was a poetry book, one that her father often sang lyrics from. He would invent tunes for the poems and sing them as he worked around the property. She flipped through it, glancing at several pages before stopping on a verse that she recognized.

“O thou! whatever title suit thee,” she whispered in a melodic voice that mimicked her father’s rusty songs. She flipped to the next page of the poem and sang along to its rhymes:

“When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord,

An’ float the jinglin icy-boord,

Then water-kelpies haunt the foord

            By your direction,

An’ nighted trav’lers are allur’d

To their destruction.”

            She continued to flip through the book. Outside, as she sang, the sun finally began to rise. As she watched the sea birth the yellow rays, she thought of herself singing it up from its watery bed in a symphony of waves rocking the melody that left her lips. Like a reflection on the water, the light mirrored itself in Gilly’s eyes as it rose in the sky. It was an orb of a true alchemy, tainting all of the surfaces around it.

There she sat with the book laying across her limp hands, staring at the orb with wide eyes as it conjured up from the deep waters. The waves were hitting the rock harder and faster, and Gilly’s tune sped up until it turned into a constant nasal hum. It was interrupted only by the girl’s chaotic, off-beat breaths. The book slid off her lap and hit the floor with a thud as she stood suddenly from the chair and marched towards the back entrance of the house.

There, in the company of the sun, stood the three horses. They were shadowed by the barn and their bridles were tied to the post. Their hooves were buried in the wet soil beneath them. The black mare turned as the girl approached the animals, but the other two remained still, facing the barn. In a trance, she untied the mare’s bridle from the post. She expected the horse to neigh in declaration of its freedom or to trot around the knowe in excitement, but instead it stayed and nudged her side with its long nose.

“What do you want?”

The horse neighed, shaking its mane and stepping even closer to the girl. She lay a hand on its black coat and thought to ride it, but the only saddle that the family owned was hanging high up in the barn. With a bare foot, Gilly kicked over the bucket which was only a quarter full of a potion of rainwater and sea mist. She dragged the bucket towards the post and then flipped it on its back. Standing on the overturned bucket, she jumped onto the horse and was barely able to balance on its boney back. The horse’s skeletal legs hesitated backwards as the girl’s weight shifted forwards. She grabbed onto the long hair of the mare’s mane and pressed her chest against the animal. It walked slowly away from the other horses, following the narrow path of soil that led up to a larger knowe.

The mare sped up as it reached the incline of the knowe, pulling the weight upwards. Gilly leaned forward and wrapped her hands around the horse’s neck as its hips rocked back and forth. As they reached the top of the grassy hill, the water came into view again. She pulled the horse’s hair to signal a halt. Below them, frothy waves hit the edge of the rock and the cold mist sprinkled her face.

As she breathed in the smell of the ocean, the horse stumbled forward onto the rocks. Gilly fell forward onto her chest and reached around the horse’s neck for balance. In a desperate panic, her legs suffocated the belly of the animal in their grasp. The girl’s body stuttered with the horse as it continued down the hill that had quickly turned into a rocky cliffside.

“Stop!”

The horse picked up speed. Its hooves slid over the kelp that coated the rocks, but it continued to run towards the water, seemingly unalarmed. Its neck bounced up and down in an off-beat dance, its mane hitting against the girl’s chin as she desperately clung to the moving body. The horse continued to stumble down the jagged cliffside and in a stiff lurch forward, Gilly bit her tongue, nearly severing it in half. Dark blood exploded onto her pale arms but disappeared onto the horse’s black mane.

They hit the water. Gilly felt her toes go cold first, and then her knees, hips, and chest. Still, she clung to the horse, pulling its hair until it braided around her fingers like a snake constricting its prey. She felt the animal’s unsteady body beneath her, but when she looked downwards, she saw only dark water.

In a twist of leg and hoof and tail, the girl fell off the side of the horse, fingers still tangled in its mane. Waves bobbed over a slick head of hair as the horse continued deeper into the water. Salt burned on her tongue as she exchanged blood with ocean water. She tried to pull her hands out of the horse’s mane, but her cold knuckles were tangled in a mess of snarled hair and kelp. Together, in a dizzy waltz, they became deluged by the sea.

In another world, Gilly’s father awoke to a drowned-out scream.