Melinda Giordano

 The Uffington Horse

Thousands of years ago, the earth shifted and galloped.  Miles below a primeval surface covered with forests and dragons, its white muscles stretched.  A body reached through the hidden landscape layered with the skeletons of monsters - twisted, gaping and broken.  Gems gleamed like dim lamps in the sediment, as the hooves scraped and struggled upward.

The earth quaked as the limbs thrashed:  a creature of the interior had finally let loose its unbridled anger at being tethered underground for endless millennia.  As its heart started to beat, hills collided and valleys collapsed with the pulsing shock.  But the living things paused to listen:  to the sounds of tendons knitting, of nerves waking, to the life fighting beneath them.  They knelt, to be warmed by the currents of blood coursing in violent, subterranean rivers.
 
Ribs burst from the spine.  Above, there rose a new mountain range, fruit of the proud, skeletal birth.  Below, the heart sang like a bird inside the cage.  As the equine spirit battled for its freedom, strata buckled, prehistoric history crumbled, dark stories were lost.
 
Then, the ground split, as silver bones - curved like a ship, tall and straight as a cathedral - exploded through the ancient, unnamed land.  Head, neck, withers, legs shivered into the open.  With each movement, the coasts changed their silhouettes, with each kick, another continent broke away.

But the green paddock was not sweet enough.  The white horse grew impatient with its verdant embrace.  It recoiled from the woodlands that clung and pleaded, it tried to leap into the sky that taunted and tempted like a sapphire maiden.  Her cool breath and cloudy hair made the horse yearn upwards.  It whinnied in impatience, and the sound echoed through underground chambers and swirled around the rock formations like blind currents.

But the earth was a jealous planet.  The sky wore a crown, dusted with starry jewels, and constellations were embroidered into its dark veil.  Its hem was pale and graceful in the morning; towards evening the colors became rich and exotic, like a shipment of distant spices.

The sky had been given enough.  The earth would not let go of the white tattoo that pranced and kicked within its flesh.  The earth held it close until it was subdued and became still.  Ever since then the landscape held a memory so deep that it was scarred forever;  a vision that grew outwards -the horse's final, dispairing leap into the galaxy's patient, invisible arms.