The Horse Show

Constantly near you, I never in my entire sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday or half so well. We talked. you were never so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies of place and time. We talked of ourselves, intimately, a thing never heard between us. How long have we waited? almost a hundred years. You said, Unless there is some spark, some spirit we keep within ourselves, a life, a continuing life's impossible-and it is all we have. There is no other life, only the one. The world of the spirits that come afterward is the same as our own, just like you sitting there they come and talk to me, just the same. They come to bother us. Why? I said. I don't know. Perhaps to find out what we are doing. Jealous, do you think? I don't know. I don't know why they should want to come back. I was reading about some men who had been buried under a mountain, I said to her, and one of them came back after two months, digging himself out. It was in Switzerland, you remember? Of course I remember. The villagers tho't it was a ghost coming down to complain. They were frightened. They do come, she said, what you call my 'visions.' I talk to them just as I am talking to you. I see them plainly. Oh if I could only read! You don't know what adjustments I have made. All I can do is to try to live over again what I knew when your brother and you were children-but I can't always succeed. Tell me about the horse show. I have been waiting all week to hear about it. Mother darling, I wasn't able to get away. Oh that's too bad. It was just a show; they make the horses walk up and down to judge them by their form. Oh is that all? I tho't it was something else. Oh they jump and run too. I wish you had been there, I was so interested to hear about it.