Horse Meet

I took a writing class in Portland when I first moved back home in 2007. It was a memoir class in a room above a pet grooming place. It smelled like pet shampoo and dust.

There were no men in the class. One woman had self published a book about growing up in Oregon. When she read in class, she seemed to shut down and just list details. It made me want to buy her book and eat the pages.

Another woman was writing a book about her family. I didn't know how it ended, but the sections she would read in class always had this dark undercurrent. I kept waiting to find out her dad molested her and she killed him.

Another woman had a Hitler mustache. She was the funniest lady in class. She wrote about working in a call center.

One woman was my age. She talked about the time Nancy Reagan came to her class and told them to stay off drugs, and how she did drugs later that night.

I wish I could remember this one woman's name. She wrote a lot of stories about her childhood. She often cried in the middle. She had super long hair and she was probably at least 50 years old. I assume she was molested, but she never wrote about it.

This one time she wrote about how she asked her father for a pony, and he sort of tormented her by pretending to get her one. She waited every day in the lane for this pony, and it never came. At the end of it she started crying.

Her tears brought out the worst in me. For some reason, I was really enraged. I think because when someone cries, it pulls you in and makes you feel their pain, and her pain was over a pony she didn't get. I was thinking, yeah, I wanted a lot of things I didn't get, why does this bitch get to corner the market on sadness because she didn't get a pony.

I sort of started obsessing about her pony. I daydreamed about getting her a pony. I would get her a pony and leave it out in the street. I'd go to class and I'd tell her I had a surprise for her. I'd tell her to look out the window, but first I'd position two people on the street below. One person would be in charge of letting the pony go so it could run down the street. The other person, would be sitting in a semi truck, waiting for the signal. Right as she looked out the window, I'd tell the guy to let the pony go. Then, just as he came into view, I'd tell the semi truck driver to drive as fast as he could toward the horse.

I must have thought about that moment twenty times during that class.

I have not had a sandwich yet today.