Good morning, good afternoon and good evening readers,

I wrote this piece for my mum when she came across a dead foal in a field near her home. She liked it a lot, and I hope you do too. Enjoy 🙂

The Beauty of Foals and Flies

Since childhood, I’ve loved exploring forests, fields, hidden glades, and barren moors. The world of people and people made places felt chaotic and loud. So loud that I couldn’t think the thoughts I wanted to because the world became a place of distractions. Among those distractions came distresses in the shapes of humans and their shadowing memories, all dusted with a layer of smog from the traffic which pierced through lifeless buildings. Everywhere, the traffic. So, I decided from an incredibly young age that I would live in a world that was all my own. I don’t know whether I was born with this desire or if it budded later on when life got tough. But what I do know is that this instinct came to me, and it came rushing through from my ancestors. Their clay-like and muddy words built the walls of my favourite natural world, and for once I had discovered a space where I didn’t have to be a creature with inherited demands and expectations. I could be me, forever young and free, to roam in a world of mother nature’s magic.

Sometimes I escape to my world that’s safe and hidden, where lavender springs against silver moons and sunflowers rise to their mother. Sibling stars look down upon their earthiness with envy as the sunflowers admire back at their galactic capacities. Hedgerows offer seasons of foodie explorations, where, as an adult, I make spells of wild garlic butter and nettle beer and wash it all down with blooming cups of elderflower champagne. Roads are seldom trodden but never lonely, fields thrum with wildlife and the wind rustles through the long bluebell dusted grass, searching for its tails even though it knows it will never find them. But what does that matter to the wind?
“Pfffffffffft!” it whistles, “What does it matter to me?”
“If this wasn’t my intended life, well, then I’d be a tree.
All those roots twisting in the dirt, they rarely lose their ground
because that’s the beauty of being a tree, their self never needs to be found.
But I am the wind, you see, I am not a tree
And my job is to carry things from places you can’t see.”
In my world, things are left to be the things they are. So, the trees continue to grow old collecting rings like knotted and gnarled jewellers and the wind, well the wind creates tunnels through our existence, eternally chasing its tails.

One day, when walking through my world I came across a foal. It was just lying there, almost frozen, and rigid, yet still with the softness that can only be found in infant creatures. Its legs were bent at right angles, as though it were a motion shot of it running towards its mother against a green screen. But the mother was nowhere to be found, and the green screen was the grassy blanket of the secluded glade. Little foal wasn’t quite a new-born, as there was no trace of an umbilical cord, but I would say it was only a week or so old. Peace dressed its matted fur and calm shielded its eyes from the blaring sun, and from a distance, you would think that it was just sleeping. I suppose in a way it was. The air was fresh with that distinct smell of something that had only just left. Perhaps this little foal’s mother had laid with it, only leaving when she knew she really had to accept it until she knew that all hope had dimmed. You see, the mothers know when it is happening, they know the smell of death. Studying its hooves, the maroon wet hair on its body; I felt that I wanted to sit with it, talk to it, put some tree branches over it so the moss could keep it warm, put little foal to bed. As I got closer, that’s when I saw them, staring cartoon-like into another world that I was not a part of. Those black glassy eyes crumbling and caving as the flies fed from the sockets. Eyelashes matted with gunk and morning dew and tears. I wondered if foals and horses really did cry or if that thought was just to make my sadness ease. Whether or not they did cry, I was crying, for them both and for other things. It’s a Mother thing, you see, I felt for poor horsey Mother and wondered how it felt to lose a child. Did she graze beside it nudging it occasionally with hope? Was there sadness in her leaving and would she forget it soon? Where was she going to, and would grief follow her through the forest? Was there ever grief? With death comes eternally unanswered questions, because once something dies all the answers that could have ever been given, have been given. But questions, they continue to be created.

Weeks have passed since I came across a little foal and its presence still hangs over me as I walk through my hidden world with all of my unanswered questions. Sometimes if I am calm enough, and still enough, I can hear the quietness of its death entangled in the wind. Curious branches brush against my skin knowingly as singing streams flow on without me. I think of all the mothers and the mother made places, the father and brother and sister made places, and I wonder how many of those places I am still able to visit, and how many are far behind me. People often say death shows no mercy, but it was life who came that quiet morning with unstoppable hunger, as brutal flies ate out little foal’s eyes against the luscious green backdrop of the glade. Who would have thought so much could be learnt from the death of foals and the lives of flies?

In thinking,
C x