Char, Charred

Deciding that Char should learn to shoe horses, her grandfather sent her to Ida. Never mind that Ida had raised and sold turkeys, not horses, or that she was eighty-nine years old and had rid herself of the turkeys a decade past. Or that Char considered horses a mode of transport for people of yore. She had never been within an arm's length of a horse that she could recall. She didn't count the fat ponies ridden at church fairs. Those ponies had long ago resigned themselves to their own sad reality as beasts of burden and dismissed whatever longings floated through their equine brains. They plodded sedately in circles, the squealing children atop them digging their heels into the ponies' sides and waving excitedly at smiling parents. An unsmiling handler led them by, reins grasped loosely in his hands. The children clung to the shaggy manes. They still dreamed, those children. Not the ponies, and not Char, though she had once. But at twenty-three, like the ponies, she had released her yearnings for a hard truth about life's intentions toward her. Evidently her grandfather had yet to realize the same. He was excited when he outlined his plan, and she had neither the heart nor the will to disillusion him.