Norma and The Flying Horse

A fiction wonder story ~Iva Enright

This story is an excerpt from a longer novel-length story I’m working on…

My Grandmother had a best friend called Norma. She told me this story often, the story of Norma and her white stallion, and she swore it was true. Of course, truth and stories and heat and memory are interwoven together in our part of the world. Some parts stretched out, some parts faded, some vivid and bright. This is the nature of how things get fixed in history in small southern towns like Newtonville, South Carolina. This story rose up out of the back seat of my grandmother’s 1957 Chevy nomad, Bertha, as if my grandmother was still in the car, telling the stories and laughing like she did.

                                                            Norma

Norma was the youngest daughter of the man who owned the biggest house in town. Bill Breeden. She was a tiny thing who, already, at the age of ten, fluttered through life like a bewildered bird as if daily she flew into the window glass, and daily, she was dazed by the exertion of living. In the mornings, Norma had to learn becoming a lady lessons, along with some obligatory reading and writing. She learned to crochet and how to serve tea, which fork went with which dish, and which set of sterling silver to use for each occasion. But on the afternoons she was set free, she slipped unnoticed past the tall white columns of her front porch and wandered down the street singing to herself. She wandered along the cracked pavements of Newtonville, thinking if she sang in a pure enough way, the horse she yearned for would meet her on the corner in front of Mr. Mackey’s grocery shop. There were no horses in Newtonville, only houses and sidewalks needing repair and one streetlight at the edge of town in front of Farren’s diner. After that, tobacco and cotton fields stretched out to the horizon lying on the flat land like a baccy green and cottony white patchwork quilt. Once, she believed she’d seen a mule sauntering along in the tobacco field, but when she looked again, she realized it was only an apparition made up of the shimmering waves of heat rising up and twisting with the sky. Sometimes she felt she’d just faint dead right there on the sidewalk it was so hot. 

            One night at the dinner table, Norma said, “Daddy, I sure would like to have a horse. We could put him out in the carriage yard, and he would be my best friend. He’s pure white with a whorl that looks like a star on his forehead.

            “Sister, hush. What are you goin’ on about?”

            “A horse Daddy, my horse.” 

            Her Daddy sat back in his chair and put his hands across his fat belly. He studied his daughter and then turned to his wife, a small woman, whom Norma favored, named Bitty. Bitty looked like she’d been washed too many times, and all the color of her fabric had faded away. “Bitty, what is this girl talking about?”

“I don’t know, Billy. I don’t know where she gets these ideas.”

“Y’all don’t understand anything,” Norma said, leaping out of her chair and knocking it over.

Billy Breeden looked startled, and then he began to laugh. He laughed so hard his face turned red. 

“It ain’t funny!”

“Don’t say ain’t Norma,” her mother pushed her rice into a tight little mound on her plate.

“Ain’t. Ain’t. Ain’t,” Norma whispered so loud the room rattled.

“Norma May! Don’t you sass your Mama! What on earth has got into you? What would you do with a foolish creature like a horse?”

“I’d ride him. He would be my friend.”

“So, you could be like that little girl Bonnie in Gone with the Wind? Remember what happened to that girl?”

“I wouldn’t be so prideful. I would be careful.” She righted her chair and sank onto it, staring at her plate. She bit the inside of her cheek so hard she felt a little pop and her tooth go through the skin, but the bitter tear stayed in her eye so her Daddy could not see.

At 3 am, the full moon flowed in a milky river, puddling on the floor of Norma’s room. Norma woke to a tapping sound on her window, and then another sound followed, harder to identify—a rumbly nickery sound. Norma crept out of bed and pulled back the curtains. Her white horse with the star-shaped whorl on its forehead was shimmering in the moonlight. She drew in a sharp breath and stepped back so quickly that she knocked the lamp off the nightstand.

“Shoot!”  she cried out loudly, bringing her mother rushing through the door with her pin curls trailing behind her. Norma stooped down to pick up the fallen lamp.

“Norma, what on earth are you doing?”

“Nothing Mama. I had a dream, is all.”

“Sugar, you liked to scared me to death. Get back into bed now.”

“Yes, Mam.”

Norma crept back into bed, laid her head on the pillow, and pulled the covers up close to her face. Her Mama kissed her on the forehead and told her to have sweet dreams from now on, and she glided from the room. 

As soon as the door closed behind her, Norma shot back to the window, and there, off in the distance but still within sight, was her white horse nibbling at the grass.

The next day Norma rushed to meet her best friend, Lib, at Mr. Mackey’s.

“I have to tell you something you just won’t believe, but you have to believe me. And you have to swear you won’t tell one single person on this earth.” 

“I swear to God, hope to die if I lie,” Lib said solemnly.

Norma stood up on her toes and pushed back Lib’s black hair, and whispered the tale of her white horse arriving in the night like an apparition, not noticing the smirk spreading across Lib’s face.

“Norma May, I think you musta banged your head in the night, and you gone all funny, like.”

Norma clamped her mouth shut. She bit into the hard ice cream sandwich and flounced out of the store.

That night Norma waited until all the world was silent to climb from her window with an apple in her pocket. She knew horses liked apples. She wandered up the moonlit sidewalk away from the slumbering house. She didn’t find the horse until she reached the edge of the town, where the road petered out, and the cotton began. There he was, luminous and calm, watching her as if he’d been waiting. As she crept closer to him, she felt her heart ticking harder under her ribs, and a white glow so bright emanated from the horse she thought for a minute he would blind her. Finally, she reached him, and he was tall and warm. She tentatively put her hand on his shoulder, and he made a low nickery noise and nuzzled her. Out of the cotton came another horse and then another until she was surrounded in her small barefoot night-gowned state by these large creatures. They bathed her in their breath. The white one, her horse, nudged her with his large fine boned head and pushed her to his side. A small brown horse nudged her from behind.

“Can I ride on you?”

The stallion whinnied and nudged her side.

So, Norma grabbed onto his long white mane and clambered onto his back. He began moving through the cotton slowly, with the herd of horses following behind like a long river swishing through the sleeping cotton, mirroring the stars above them in the black and glittery sky. And then the stallion began to run. Norma gasped and clung to his neck. His mane was flying now, and her mane flew too, and they propelled so fast they lifted off the ground and soared above the white sticky cotton, up up up into the glittering river, through a hidden doorway into the black behind the light. Just utter peace, utter silence. They floated out there in the inky night, and her stallion whispered his secrets to her, and she began to remember herself and the ways of her very own heart.

Down on earth, a streak of pink crept across the horizon, and the herd of horses descended back into the cotton. Norma climbed off her stallion and stood dazed and wobbly by his side. A small horse with a long yellow mane stepped forward and sent her a message without words right into her brain and then down into her heart.

As life goes on, don’t close up your heart.

Many years later, Norma told this story to Lib. And when Lib started to tease her,

Norma told her, “This kind of growing up y’all insist is real life. That’s just closing up your heart, and I’m not going to play.”

My grandmother ended the story by adding.

Norma is the kindest person I have ever known. She is gracious and thoughtful and never says an unkind word about anyone. She never did seem to get any horses in real life, but who knows what went on out there behind the night sky and in the starry regions of her heart. There is more to life than we can fathom.

Don’t forget that honey child.