EVENS
by Johnny Rodger

When I took the apple from the horse’s mouth, I thought I knew it didn’t want me to speak. -Not the horse. And not that this is speaking, or for that matter, even knowing. Because despite the warmth, and the teeth, and the strings of saliva as it was gifted to me, the skin of the apple shone in the sun. Glinted in my eye, would be an expression, I guess, of that way of knowing it without really speaking anyhow. There are no words, in fact, I said to the horse, but that they give us an illusion ( -she was nodding already, the horse -), the illusion of sexing … sorry, I mean, of knowing. But maybe, she seemed to be saying, knowing and nodding are the same thing? I shook my head. This was a crossroads at which a lot of head movement took place. Which is why I’m not sure it wasn’t sex. Put it this way: all the traffic between me and the horse, she and I, consisted in fruit. The fruit that preferred me silent. That preferred silence. For an apple’s word is better for at least two reasons: First of all, this one had come from the mouth of my mare. There is no second reason, but a horse’s word is its bond, even if this were actually an apple, and she had only nodded. Besides, how could you take that gifted globe of crisp white flesh for other than a sign? None of which is true, however, because there were literally acres of apples all around us. On this earth. And we could not know –how could we know? – about the white crisp or any other kind of flesh, because they were shining in our faces. Their cheery green and red skins glittering in the sun. That alone was enough to make us nod our heads. This time in unison though, she and I, the horse, for we agreed, seemed to agree, that although she was officially, as it were, not my best friend, nonetheless throughout some long centuries she had been a help meet for me, and we agreed that we probably did not know, could not know, and this was our nodding, anything about flesh at all. Sometimes agreements are dangerous, of course. We were at one that is to say, but without the flesh, which cannot obviously be a real, whole, complete or satisfactory one. For while the skin of the thing shines unbroken in the sun, how can you know the flesh? Should we ask for the sun to stop shining then? We’d have to know, to nod in agreement, that it was our shared desire. That would be another ‘one’, an agreement, an accord, whose refinement, whose divesting of any difference, would require great concentration, much eye to brown eye contact, a putting of our nostrils soft together with deep and light breaths, and an abstraction of positions to the extent that, ironically for the nod, (of her long face and simultaneously mine, roundish, back at her), ironically for the nod there could be no movement. It would be the one. At one. Which no-movement doesn’t seem to mean that the one is the same as the nothing. For the one has content – the apple albeit unbroken and without experience of the flesh – whereas the nothing is in the dark, has no distinctions, is without contour, is the unknowable flesh. This is the conundrum that the horse had seemed to be articulating by having the apple in its mouth in the first place. In the dark. The apple closed in her gums beside those great yellowing molars, and wrapped in strings of saliva. Not to mention her huge lolling pink tongue. I was not disgusted when she offered this gift apple unbitten, unbroken and seemingly on a whim. It was the genuine, if unexpected apple. How could I not know it as such? What were my credentials however? What were the chances? How should I be so lucky that this word of the apple be proffered to me?