The little white ceramic horse who came in a tea box and didn’t whinny. The way the tape measure snapped its yellow tongue back into its square shell. Not to mention the giant pinking shears shutting those zigzag crocodile teeth. I hid like a spy in the high attic dormer as the neighbor opened her dollhouse door. How nobody in the world knew I was there, how the warm inner crook of my elbow tasted like honeysuckle, how I held myself in my own arms.

The dark cortege of carriages careens to the dump, dashing forth to hold cold court among rats and rot. From which cruel window will a curtained face curse the little cart horse as he canters the cobbled lane? But the dear little horse just lifts his hoof and twitches his coarse hairiness. Hear his bells ring. Nothing, not even the bare brassiness of his unpolished buckles, the ochre brown of blindered eyes, can ever disguise his own mute gladness.