A Flock of Horses

There was one year, not long after we moved in to the house my mother built when we were young, that a thunder storm loomed over the horizon. We could see the lightning flickering inside of the monstrous black cloud that loomed with its hunched back, and we could hear the cracks of thunder peeling after each flicker. My brother and I were standing in the front yard, watching it make its way towards us. It lumbered over the shadowed hills like the great giant beast it was. Luke and I stood there, waiting for the fat freezing rain drops to fall. We could hear them smacking against the hill in front of us, watched them fall but felt nothing.

Then the rain hit, cold, and freezing and wonderfully refreshing at the end of a hot humid day. We stood there listening to the thunder and watching the lightning when the ground below us began to shake. It felt like the thunder that we had been listening to above us had suddenly and swiftly moved to the ground below us, until it cracked right above our heads again. I began to frantically look around, grabbing my brother by the hand, when suddenly I saw the wild eyes and wind-blown manes of our neighbor's horses as they crested the hill. Somehow having made it over their electric fence (or perhaps the power went out and thus the fence) they had, apparently, felt that heading in the direction of our house was the most logical answer to their panicked dilemma. I grabbed Luke by the hand and pulled him towards the garage, screaming to my mom the entire way.

My mom flung open the front door, looking as if she may have a heart attack; she said later I had been screaming like I was being murdered. Consequently, seeing the horses in our front yard surprised her, but she was still more angry at me for screaming like I was being attacked with a butcher knife.

I'm not really sure what happened after that, only that she called the neighbors to come and get their horses. I'm not even really sure how the neighbors got their horses back down the hill, because there had to have been at least ten of those ragged and frantic beasts in our yard.