REMY BARNES' fiction appears in EPOCH, The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the University of Texas, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, the Catskill Center, and Cornell University where he received his MFA and taught courses on fiction, poetry and film. He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California where he is a PhD Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing. He lives in Los Angeles and is at work on a novel.

The bed beside him was empty. He sat up and called her name, but the room maintained its sacral stillness. She did not answer to his calls as he pinballed around the house in his pre-dawn stupor. The back door hung open like a broken jaw. The light of the moon chromed the dead grass beneath him. Something moved far across the acreage of untilled property—a thin white figure, a distant candle with a wick of black hair, her night dress fluttering in the wind. The ground was cold, the dark holding its wintery chill. Though he called out, she did not stop. He moved quickly toward her, his breath burning in his chest as she disappeared into the country darkness.

Three taught chords of barbed wire denoted the beginning of the McGuire property. A sliver of white silken fabric was caught in one of the rusted spurs. He moved over the wire. A herd of Jersey cow huddled together beneath the outstretched fingers of an oak tree, its branches hard and bare in the early winter. He ran until he saw the farmhouse, windows dark and drapes pulled, and, beyond it, the barn door half-opened.

Inside the stalls, the horses stirred and whinnied. A colt with an eye like turquoise seaglass reared. She was in the back of the barn with the prostrate broodmare, stomach fat with foal. She stood over the horse and calmed it with soft cooing. She was covered in a film of red grit and flat stems of golden straw were entwined in the dark curls of her hair. He tried speaking to her but she would not listen, could not hear him. This specialist warned him this could be common for sleepwalkers: they engage in a task somewhere in the labyrinthine halls of their dream and are unable to be awakened. It has led to injury, the specialist had said, it is has led to death. He held her in his arms and said her name. The mare shook its head and, though it tried, it could not will itself to stand. He put his hand on her fist and, inside her icy fingers, found the vial. It was kind of poison if administered in too great a quantity. Not enough to kill the mother but would not spare the child. My God, he thought and then said, “My God.”

He took her by the elbow, pressing hard enough into her skin to leave a mark, hoping to rouse her from this nightmare they were both now having together. Her face broke with sudden recognition, and she screamed. There are tremendous amounts of power inside of us, he thought. When we use it all at once, it can be terrifying. She swallowed the sound and her stomach began to grow, becoming as large as a kettledrum, splitting her night dress damp with dew and exposing her pale belly. Then, she grew to match it, taller and taller until she broke through the roof beams of the barn and cracked the sky. Towering above him, he could no longer see her face until she deigned to look down upon him there amongst the rubble, the splintered slats, the frightened horses banging their hooves against the metal walls of their stalls. She bore down like she was trying to move her bowels, gritting her teeth and, from out her naked belly, came those half-formed creatures with their long terrible faces and wide flat teeth.

He gazed upon these malformed newborns, dewy with blood and other unknown, unclassifiable fluids, braying and writhing at their feet. All at once, he was struck by the thought that he, not her, was in fact the sleepwalker stuck inside of an uninterrupted dream. A dream beginning when she was seventeen and he quite a bit older as they lay naked together in the smeary glow of that first summer with the rain falling like tacks on the tin roof of a stable now existing only in their memories. He realized that everything since—every place and every person, every stillborn foal and every barren broodmare—existed within a poem recited only once and then pieced back together by the listener by recollection alone.

Some years later, he was having lunch in the city with his fiancée and recalled all of this quite suddenly though he did not mention it to her then and never did. At the exact moment of this remembrance, she untwined her fingers from his and looked upon him, however briefly, as if she did not recognize him.

It had been a good month. Each morning, the veterinarian woke feeling rested and each morning he unwrapped his wife like a gift. She came from the sleeping bag with hair plastered to her forehead like a new and wet baby bird, these nightly issues, whatever they were or had once been, had been solved. He’d called and quit Chauncey’s Limp-Inn for her, explaining the circumstances. Chauncey understood, of course, as a man’s marriage is a vessel his own to steer but was remiss to lose his best and only waitress.

While there were some stillborn foals yet, a goodly number of broodmares were pregnant, and the veterinarian eagerly anticipated the safe arrival of a new generation. He had to maintain these hopes. His reputation was staked on it. Any more of this and people would no longer trust the safety of their horses in his care.

He was helping her cut her steak, squealing his knife back and forth through the gristle when she said, “I’m late.” The medication made her less than lucid and given her a dreamy kind of drunkenness in her talk and action. But then she plucked the knife from his fist, set it down and moved his palm to her belly. There was nothing there, not yet, just the feel of her shirt against her skin against her ribcage.

He mashed his greasy mouth against hers, and said, “We’ll have to wean you. The medication isn’t good for the baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “But what if something happens?”

He sighed and caressed the skin of her middle knuckle. “It’ll be alright,” he said. “Maybe the troubles have finally passed.”

She nodded. “Like a bad storm.”

“Yes, like a bad storm.”

“You always know just what to do,” she said and pressed her forehead into his shoulder. “It’s just in your nature.”

It had been a good month. Each morning, the veterinarian woke feeling rested and each morning he unwrapped his wife like a gift. She came from the sleeping bag with hair plastered to her forehead like a new and wet baby bird, these nightly issues, whatever they were or had once been, had been solved. He’d called and quit Chauncey’s Limp-Inn for her, explaining the circumstances. Chauncey understood, of course, as a man’s marriage is a vessel his own to steer but was remiss to lose his best and only waitress.

While there were some stillborn foals yet, a goodly number of broodmares were pregnant, and the veterinarian eagerly anticipated the safe arrival of a new generation. He had to maintain these hopes. His reputation was staked on it. Any more of this and people would no longer trust the safety of their horses in his care.

He was helping her cut her steak, squealing his knife back and forth through the gristle when she said, “I’m late.” The medication made her less than lucid and given her a dreamy kind of drunkenness in her talk and action. But then she plucked the knife from his fist, set it down and moved his palm to her belly. There was nothing there, not yet, just the feel of her shirt against her skin against her ribcage.

He mashed his greasy mouth against hers, and said, “We’ll have to wean you. The medication isn’t good for the baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “But what if something happens?”

He sighed and caressed the skin of her middle knuckle. “It’ll be alright,” he said. “Maybe the troubles have finally passed.”

She nodded. “Like a bad storm.”

“Yes, like a bad storm.”

“You always know just what to do,” she said and pressed her forehead into his shoulder. “It’s just in your nature.”

The McGuire farm was close enough to their property that they could walk through the quarter-mile of pines but they drove, taking the long way around the highway. They pulled through a gate with a cow skull bolted to the awning. A few ranch hands had their boots up against a corroded wooden fence, watching a chocolate-colored Tennessee Walker prance and dally. The sun was a naked halogen bulb behind the fogged glass of clouds.

McGuire greeted the veterinarian warmly and seemed surprised but pleased she’d come along with him. It’d been some time since she’d returned to a working ranch and she felt a forlorn sense of belonging like returning to a childhood home only to find it now inhabited by strangers.

She accompanied the men to the stable where the mare had already been bedded in a mound of straw dampened some by amniotic fluid. The mare lay on her side, stomach distended and breath shallow. She was restless, appearing colic, and was trying to roll over to get back to her feet. A few ranch hands had gathered around to watch.

“It’s going to get pretty nasty,” McGuire said to no one in particular but in her direction.

The mare tensed and quivered as she expelled the foamy white membrane containing the foal. McGuire moved to assist the mare, but the veterinarian put up a hand, stopping him. “Give her time,” he said.

The men watched. She became aware that it was all men, and then her and the mare. Her husband bit down on his thumbnail as, slowly, the foal emerged: first one slim hoof and then another and then the white tip of his nose. The foal’s head was near free when the mare seemed to give up. The minutes stretched endlessly and yet the broodmare would not continue. Finally, her husband knelt before the broodmare and submerged his hands in the membrane attempting to guide the head from the birth canal.

It was then that the broodmare looked up at her as if there was some secret she wanted to tell her but could not because of the men. Something within her grew annoyed and then grew angry. Push, she thought. The horse opened its mouth and champed its flat teeth. “Push,” she said like she was trying to reason with it. The veterinarian gave her a sidelong glance. She hooked her leg over the pen, first one and then the other, and then dropped inside. Someone said something like “Hey,” but she was already standing over the animal. “Push,” she said again. This time with a near religious fervor. The mare shook her head, bits of straw caught in her black mane. A nervous energy surged among the men. They did not know the protocol for this.

Her husband, hands slick with viscera, turned to her and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” but she had already dropped to her knees beside him, digging the heels of her hand into the animal’s hard stomach. The mare groaned, yellow eye rolling in her head.

“That’s a seven-thousand-dollar goddamn horse,” McGuire said, crowding into the pen. He took her by the crook of her elbow, wrenching the sore spot and making is sing. He tried pulling her away, but she tore from his grip. She shoved that hard belly, could feel the foal beneath the skin and ribs. The veterinarian worked in concert with his wife, pulling while she pushed. The mare kicked and whinnied and then expelled the foal. The smell of urine and salt permeated the stable.

Then, McGuire grabbed her by the waist and carried her kicking from the pen. She bit down hard on her tongue, warm blood filled her mouth. She spit and cursed until she’d wore herself out. McGuire set her down against the hard, red dirt. McGuire’s wife brought her some water and squatted beside her. The blood in her mouth colored the clear liquid as she drank. She found she was crying or maybe she was trying to say something but couldn’t find the breath to do it. McGuire wife said, “You OK?” Dust rose and clouded the air around her. She could taste the iron in the dirt.

Across the grounds, her husband stayed beside the broodmare as the foal lay unmoving. He peeled away the remains of the bluish membrane and confirmed what was suspected. The mare’s breaths came out rapid. The men discussed tending to the horse, what to do with the dead foal, how difficult it was to bury another in so many weeks. 


Her heart was still hammering in her head as they got back into the truck. The ranch hands watched them drive away, flatting their palms across the brows of their misshapen skulls.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s time to smooth your rough edges,” he said, and dialed a number. 

“Who’re you calling?” she said but already knew.

He said into the phone: “One Vitalodrine and one Diaxepam,” and then he hung up.

They drove the short distance home in silence, passed a brown cow and her calf suckling beneath it. Her husband let her out at the front door and then drove to town. She locked the windows and the door and unplugged the phone. Shame enveloped her. She thought she’d seen life in the foal’s misty eyes, something all the men standing around had been blind to, and if she could help get it out a little faster, it would live. But she’d been mistaken. The foal, like all the others, was born dead.

He returned home just as dusk was turning the treetops into a blur of small beckoning hands. In his arms was a purple orchid, fake looking, which he placed on the table. From his pocket, he pulled an orange bottle. The pills inside jangled arrhythmically.

“What are those?” she said.

“A mild tranquilizer,” he said.

Her husband tapped a pill into his palm and then laid it on the table next to a glass of fragrant well water. She placed the pill onto her tongue. He handed her the glass and she drank. Soon, her head felt light and wonderful and her legs turned soft. She was exhausted in a new, improbable way. She felt him lift her by the armpits and puppeteer her into the bedroom. Stretched across their bed was a full body sleeping bag with two of her winter mittens laid on top.

“This is what the specialist recommended,” the veterinarian said. “It’ll keep you from wandering.”

She felt the loving removal of her jeans and shirt, the partisan dark of the approaching unconsciousness. She felt his weight atop her, the skin of his stomach against hers, his breath moving in and out like a balloon unsure of its own fullness.

After, he helped her into the bag and slipped the mittens over her hands explaining that they were to ensure she couldn’t free herself. He zipped her in with a pleasing metallic hiss. She felt as if she had been spun into a cocoon and would emerge on the other side an improved version of herself. Lying there in the bounded safety, she thought about her mother and father who were each in their forties when they conceived a girl who they named Judith but Judith had come much too early in a crisis of blood and flesh. A year later, they conceived her—something of a miracle—to replace this lost child. She often thought about this missing sister and how you have to make great sacrifices to get what you desire most.  

That night, in her dreams, a nude haruspex held court over a crowd of creatures with long snouts and large flat teeth, neither human nor animal. Or perhaps both human and animal. The haruspex had carved her own intestines from her stomach and held the sodden organs out over the crowd. She then wrapped the organs around her shoulders like a shawl. In the early, liminal moments between sleeping and wake, she at first felt disturbed by these images but it slowly became a source of comfort. There was nothing to be frightened of. Nothing in that curious tableau was going to harm her. She drank a glass of water to rinse the taste of old iron from her mouth. There was a crust of brown under her fingernails that she dug out with a safety pin, pricking blood from her cuticles.

The veterinarian was buttoning a blue shirt in the orange light of the bathroom. The tub was stained with soap and soon it would have to be cleaned. The sink was streaked with dirt as if someone had washed their hands after working in the yard. She commented on the slate gray sky outside the window, the absence of birds, the coming winter.

“You were gone last night,” he said. “For hours.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I slept soundly. I remember clearly, I dreamt of a horse made out of paper and cloth, the same color and shape as the one—you remember—who had the broken leg.” The efficiency of this lie did not surprise her.

“I woke up at one in the morning,” he said. “And you were gone.”

“There’s no need for worry,” she said. “I must have just gone for a walk.”

He slid his necktie through his collar. She stood behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. He tensed the muscles there but then relaxed as she pressed her body into his.

“We should see a specialist,” he said. “Somnambulism is a serious condition.”

She crossed one side of the tie over there other, looped it with her thin fingers and then pulled it into a knot. She drew the knot to his throat. The hard cartilage of his Adam’s apple trembled beneath the constriction.

“That’s too tight,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

“I’ve already made an appointment,” he said. “With a specialist.”

She nodded in silent assent. There was no use in fighting him. “Who are you seeing today?” She said.

“The McGuires have a pregnant Tennessee Walker,” he said.

“The piebald one?”

“Yes,” he said, not taking his eyes from his own reflection. “I have a good feeling.”

“What if I came with you?” she said.

She looked at his face only half-reflected in the mirror, one gray eye gazing back at her. “Do you think that would be a very good idea?” he said. He had a way of asking her a question that they both knew the answer to.

“I miss them,” she said almost entirely to herself. “I miss the horses.”

He sighed. She knew he could still be moved to please her. “Go and get your coat,” he said.

In the bedroom closet, she found her coat had been hung crooked as if someone had worn it in the night. In her coat pocket, she found a small glass vial, the name of the substance inside was inscrutable to her but it had clearly come from her husband’s kit bag as his name appeared as the prescribing veterinarian. Her boots had a rim of mud around the upper sole. She realized she was pressing her fingernails into her palm creating small quarter-moons turning red and then pink and then white in her closed fists.

She waited tables at Chauncey’s Limp-Inn. Since the stables, she’d worked various jobs—mostly table service—and just because the veterinarian made good money didn’t mean she was going to stop. The veterinarian, who came from money while she had not, could not understand why and she could not explain it to him. The dynamic in simplest terms was: he wanted a wife who stayed home and she thought there was an honesty in maintaining employment. That any moment one of his colleagues could go for lunch at Chauncey’s Limp-Inn and see his wife there was a source of embarrassment for him. A child, and the subsequent job of caring for said child, would have been a satisfactory change for the both of them.

A man dressed like a cowboy, all denim and leather, came in and sat in a corner booth. He ordered a steak cooked rare. “Bleeding,” was how he put it. There were no menus at Chauncey’s Limp-Inn. You just ordered and, if they had it, Chauncey would make it.

Chauncey cooked the steak, a cigarette hanging from his ashen lips. He had a paternal affection for her because his own daughter had left the family and now refused to talk to him for reasons nobody knew, and nobody asked about. Chauncey was always making sure she was eating enough, getting enough sleep. He asked about the bruise, concern clouding his face.

“I think, I bumped it,” she said, “on the bedside table while I was getting out of bed.”

“In the dark?”

“In the dark.”

“Somnambulism?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so."

“Do you dream?”

“I can’t remember.” 

He dropped a mealy baked potato onto a plate. The steak leaked red liquid, dampening the underside of the spud. “Order up,” he said.

As she delivered the plate to the man, he put his hand on top of her wrist. He was as old as her father would have been had he lived any longer than he did.

He said, “Have I seen you somewhere before?” 

“Well,” she said. “I work here.”

“No,” he said. “The Niedermeyer farm?”

“You know my husband perhaps,” she said. “The veterinarian.”

“Skinny guy?” he said. “Pinched face?”

She nodded.

“He’s been having all that trouble,” he said. “With the horses.” The man was missing one of his front teeth, a toothpick was balanced in the breach. He said “horses” with too many syllables.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s him.”

“You’re much too young for him.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

“What do you think’s causing all that trouble?” he said. “With the horses.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not my business to know.”

She went into the kitchen and stayed there until the man left. When he was gone, she cleared his table and found he’d left her an outsized tip, a smiling face drawn on the receipt. His napkin was balled up on the table top, red with water-color blood.

An injury had occurred overnight, and a dark bruise now obscured the white skin of her elbow. On her pillowcase, a dime-sized brown stain. She scratched at it with her thumb but it would not give. She ran a finger through either ear, looking for signs of scabbing. She checked either elbow for scrapes but found nothing. Her teeth tasted of iron. She sucked at her canine tooth and then dribbled a wad of pink into her palm. She wiped the blood on her bed shirt, found a streak of dirt there.

Her husband, the veterinarian, was in the dining room, gray eyes fixed on his cellphone. The metal spoon clinked against the sides of the bowl as he stirred his oatmeal. The clock on the wall moved soundlessly. In the waning light of another failed pregnancy, their marriage had suffered. The physicality all but dissipated and what was left were these cool mornings before work, and the evening stillness with television. They were stalled and sinking like two animals stuck in a sucking mire hopelessly trying to find the other. Only, she was not sure how deep they now were.

“Another?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. 

The video continued on his phone laid flat against the table like a small window into another world. On the screen a foal fell from a broodmare’s belly, lifeless and wrapped in a translucent amniotic sac. From ages fourteen to seventeen, she’d worked summers at a stable in the town where she grew up, it’s where she first met the veterinarian. She loved being among those strong, gentle bodies. But that was a long time ago in what felt like another life. Still, it was no surprise when she ended up with him, an equine physician of some note.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You were up and down last night,” he said, changing the subject. “I could barely sleep.”

“Look,” she said and showed him her elbow. He examined the injury over his eyeglasses, the oblong bloom of black and blue and yellow, no bigger than an unsightly birthmark. He pressed his thumb along the swelling, turning the abstract pain pointed. He had a rugged kind of manner if he had one at all.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“Do you want something for the pain?” he said.

She wrenched her arm from his grip, saying, “There was no pain until you.”

“It might help you sleep.”

“I am a restful sleeper.”

“You probably just bumped your elbow on your way out of bed."

She plunged the spoon into his breakfast, jammed the spoon into her mouth and swallowed without chewing. If she had not slept through the night, she could not tell. She felt fully rested. She was somehow satisfied knowing he did not feel the same. She swallowed another spoonful. He winced as if staring at someone he did not know do something distasteful.

He stood. “I have work,” he said. “We’ll discuss this later,” and departed.

For the last six months, all the foals of these pitiable nags had come out crooked, stillborn and frightening. Given her own struggles, she couldn’t help but feel some kind of a kinship with these barren mares, and their dead children. Her husband had been tasked with finding a solution. He’d searched for it in the stomach, in the blood, in the well water for slough from the paper mill, but the cause had not revealed itself.

Once he’d gone, she finished the remains of his breakfast and drank his leftover coffee cooled to cold. She took the bowl to the kitchen. She thought she saw the face of her mother in the window above the sink, but it was simply her own reflection, the misshapen oak tree in the backyard twisting up her glassy cheek like a burn scar. They’d met at the stable while he was doing field work for his degree. With a rusted nail, he’d carved their names into a wall softened by summer rain, not deep enough, and she’d thought then that the gentle impression of the letters would not last the season and therefore neither would they. She cracked the bowl in the sink like an egg. The two ceramic halves rattled against the wet steel.