Choke by Alice Lichtenstein

I live in a silent house. My wife doesn’t talk, except a bit of this or that, then she returns to her reading. I don’t know. Maybe her mind is there; maybe it’s not. I go outside to walk the dog; no, that’s not the truth. I ride the four-wheeler, and the dog trots ahead, finds her place to do her business and heads back. She’s a good dog, Sunny. Old now, too, and still an anxious dog, but not as anxious as when we first got her. Shepherds can be like that. Skittish. Like horses. They see ghosts everywhere.

Silence is not such a bad thing. It lets me focus on the animals. Today the red fox kit, the smaller one, crept out from under the tractor and looked at me. Thanks a lot, Bud. Then trotted off. I had to laugh. The kits hide in the tall grass and wait for prey. Their mother, the vixen, has left them to hunt on their own. For a long time, though, she looked after them.

Spring. The birds are back. Crows are having conversations in the trees. Kildeer mothers are dragging their wings, willing to sacrifice their lives for their young. In the neighbor’s meadow, the heifers bellow. It’s a sad sound if you listen too close. I don’t. Cows are cows. They’ll get used to the situation. Like I did.

What’s my choice? My wife does not speak to me. What do you want for dinner? A grunt. Liver? Steak? No answer. If I’m lucky, a shrug.

We used to have a good time, my wife and me. We were a team, driving all over, visiting farms. Sick horses, sick cows. But mainly, horses. She was my assistant. She knew exactly what to do. Needle? The needle was there. Worming tube? Ready. We thought the same thoughts, we didn’t need to talk a lot.

She reads most of the day now, sitting on the sofa with the cat on her lap. If she’s not doing that, she’s on the computer watching videos of horses prancing through their routines. The riders, women and men, dress in top hats and tails as though they’re going to a royal wedding not a horse show. Bayonet was my wife’s stallion. A big warmblood. A gray. A good horse. A horse you could depend on. It was when he died, she went quiet.

I’ve handled choke a million times. It’s what happens when an object lodges in a horse’s throat and the horse can’t swallow. Horses can’t regurgitate. They can cough things out, not up. There are signs, and they are pretty obvious if you’re there to see them—frothing at the mouth; feed discharging from the nostrils. Then you can go to work—lavage, sedation. You follow with an antibiotic in case there’s infection.

Sometimes, though, it’s more complicated. Maybe there’s a mass. Maybe you can’t operate in time. Sometimes, there’s no choice.

I’d done my last barn check for the night. Nothing out of the usual. Not much, anyway. Usually, I’d get a nicker, which I took as “good night”, but Bay was quiet. I put my flashlight on him in the stall. He was lying down; his head and neck stretched, a little lethargic. I didn’t think much of it. He was tired, that’s all.

I was drinking coffee the next morning when I heard my wife screaming for me.

Bayonet was down, coughing hard, head thrashing, eyes rolling, all sclera. It was choke, all right. Terrible. Untreatable. The worst I’d ever seen.

A horse killer uses a blank gunpowder cartridge to fire a steel bolt at the velocity of 75 meters per second from the barrel to the horse’s skull. It is a single, lethal shot. Over and done. No pain.

My wife clung to her horse’s neck and a sound pulled up out of her, a sound I’d never heard a person make before. An animal sound, harsh, yet confused, the sound of a rutting deer or a dying one.

I waited for a minute, and then I could not stand it any longer. 

Let go, I told my wife. You have to.

Alice Lichtenstein is an award-winning literary fiction and short story writer. Her novels include: “The Genius of the World” (Zoland, 2000); “Lost” (Scribner, 2010); and “The Crime of Being” (Upper Hand Press, 2020). “Lost” was a long-list Finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her short story, “Revision”, was a Narrative magazine Story of the Week. Alice holds an MFA from Boston University; she teaches Creative Writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY.