The Horse With Beautiful Feet

The farm was called The Four Seasons. The last foal of the season came on the worst night of the spring, and the family stood in the barn aisle deciding, without saying it out loud, whether that was luck or a bill.

She was plain in the way cheap things are plain: too much leg, feet like saucers, a coat the colour of a wet sandbar, and a face that looked as though she had already been refused by someone.

They called her Nothing. It began as a joke and stayed a joke exactly as long as it took the buyer to leave the second time.

The dancing started in the paddock on an evening in late summer, with the mower running down the hill and the light going amber. She crossed to the far fence, stopped, backed three steps, and crossed again — turned this time through the shoulder, hind feet coming under her like a dancer's — and she did it four times, the same way, as if it were a trick she was practising for an audience of nobody.

Nancy watched from the hay shed with the pitchfork still in her hands and did not move until the filly had finished, because something in the repeated, measured, deliberate movement made it obvious that this was not a young horse being silly. It was the animal who had been worthless an hour before, doing a thing no horse on the place had ever done, and doing it as though she had all the time in the world.