Horse Mother by Franz Jørgen Neumann

In “Horse Mother,” Franz Jørgen Neumann tells the story of a woman struggling to fill the space, both physically and emotionally, left behind by her husband’s late ex-wife. Simultaneously, she must learn to be a parental figure to her grieving stepdaughter, Lilja, who has spent years at this point behaving like a horse.

Neumann utilizes physical space to both characterize and constrain our main character. She is an American now residing in Finland, living in a house previously owned by her husband’s late ex, and as such, she is constantly feeling out of place: unable to sleep with her husband because their room has two twin beds, unable to decorate the house to her liking out of respect for her stepdaughter’s grief, and feeling more comfortable in an IKEA than she does in her own home. Believing that “love is a form of cannibalism,” she eats away at parts of herself so that she can become smaller, and fit into whatever space this family can allow her to live in.

Drawing on objects and the body, Neumann shows us that motherly love, however, still manages to break through, almost violently, even in the harsh, cold, dark Finnish landscape. Our main character looks for personal keepsakes of Lilja’s mother, keeps all her old clothes in the house, and sacrifices her physical body so that Lilja can feel like a caretaker, a state that brings Lilja a sense of normality and peace. Eventually, she attempts to become a horse herself, imagining herself “a beast of leisure, no longer used for labor or loads but coaxed toward speed and beauty, tomorrow never clouding [her] mind.”

Throughout “Horse Mother,” so many details of a full life shine through: “Moomins, the culture of hobby horse competitions, the piggish squeal of a train, the tracks of a bicycle in the snow,” as Neuman writes in his author’s note. These details are the elements, the symbols and sensory components of a life, one that our main character fully embraces in order to forge one with her new family, because “if [she is] to be [her] best self, there needs to be no way out.”

In “Horse Mother,” Franz Jørgen Neumann illuminates the extent to which one will transform and adapt for love, an adaptation not only of the body, but also of the mind and spirit. —CRAFT

“My stepdaughter is a horse.”

The school psychologist waits for me to say more, then resumes her review of the pedagogical strategies she and Lilja’s teachers have employed. She speaks at a clip that makes me wonder if her impending maternity leave begins the minute this meeting ends.

“A horse,” I interrupt, again.

“The loss of one’s mother—”

“She was a horse before she lost her mother,” I say. “And before I married her father.”

The psychologist consults her swollen belly with her hands and nods slowly. I feel like the bulge contains a solution to the horse problem. Hidden under the psychologist’s Moomin sweater is a glowing orb of answers she will shine my way if I can make myself worthy.

“The other issue is the continued disruption to her cohort,” she says.

“We’ll have another talk with her.”

“Lilja needs ongoing professional support.”

She hands me a list of names and phone numbers for child psychologists, though they might as well be horse groomers and trainers, hay farmers and farriers. Then I’m outside, the Finnish winter stinging my eyes as I try to read the apologetic texts from Mika that vibrated my phone throughout the meeting. This far north and this deep into the season, winter is a form of abuse. My slips and falls have painted an aurora of bruises against the canvas of my thighs. I stow my phone and step carefully, scanning the untrodden snow at the edges of the path for signs of Lilja’s passage—the bite of her gloves, the divots of her boots’ toes. Horse tracks.

Mika didn’t tell me about his daughter’s obsession with horses until we stayed with Lilja last summer, while her mother underwent experimental treatment in Switzerland. Lilja had given up hobby horse competitions to become the horse itself. The first time she approached me at a gallop, head tucked low and her straight back rising to her rear, she induced in me a sudden fear of predation. I assumed that Lilja was stuck in a phase, that her mother’s treatment would be successful, that life would continue as it had.

Lilja is still a horse.

The house we stayed in last summer was white and sunlit. We played lawn games, grilled, and served up bowls of ice cream and berries while we waited for Lilja’s mother to return. The house before me now has turned a dirty ivory and is frigid to its bones. I long to return to the summer version, to when I still grasped the chronology of my relationship with Mika and saw our future path.

Back then I subscribed to the theory that love is a form of cannibalism. While I came at the world through the lens of art, Mika used mathematics. I wanted to consume his perspective on reality while also savoring his shyness, his height, that accented baritone. I wanted the process to take a lifetime. But my meal was interrupted when Lilja’s mother entered hospice in the fall and Mika went back overseas to care for Lilja again. I flew out for the funeral—a strange affair with people dancing the tango at the reception, making death seem sensuous.

The plan was for Mika to sell the house in Finland on Lilja’s behalf and return with her. But in the weeks that followed, he couldn’t bring himself to displace Lilja from her home, her few friends, her country, her language. Sorrow and guilt were the guardrails in his decision. I went back and packed our things, sublet our apartment, and wondered how Lilja might be tamed.

Lilja isn’t always a horse. Returning from my meeting, I find her in the living room strapped onto the inversion table that once belonged to her mother.

“Miten menee?” I say, guessing which syllables to stress as I ask Lilja how it’s going.

“Fine,” she answers in English, her hair pooling on the floor.

I open the broom closet and scan the cheat sheet of Finnish phrases I taped to the back of the door. I repeat a follow-up phrase in my head, but Lilja is already out of the inversion table and headed upstairs on all fours, her mane of hair dancing over broad shoulders, jeans damp at the hem. Hevonen. Horse.

Mika sees Lilja’s behavior as punishment for the divorce and his move away several years ago. He thinks he can interest Lilja in other pastures, like her weekend piano lessons. She never practices. Mika doesn’t comprehend that it’s futile to ask a horse to learn an instrument. I see Lilja’s behavior as tapping into an ancient notion of our mammalian selves. I’ve learned that I can’t tame her. It’s possible she may prance, gallop, and graze into adulthood, eating oats in the morning, lemongrass and carrots with her evening meals.

I prepare a quick soup for dinner. A frozen baguette thaws in the oven, whose door I leave open for the heat. I don’t set a place setting on the floor for Lilja, something her mother allowed. Then again, who am I to scold a dead woman for how she raised her daughter, for what she encouraged and indulged? I’m not living her life and her circumstances, though I am living the consequences.

Mika arrives home and stomps his boots in the entry hall. He greets me, then sits in his favorite chair, woolen slippers now on his feet. He briefly scans the page of referrals the psychologist left with me, then yawns. I stir the soup and watch him play with his fleece jacket, twisting and bulging the fabric around the zipper.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

He looks up. “Thinking about string theory landscape.” He doesn’t say more, having reverted to his recalcitrant Finnish roots, perhaps because he’s stopped thinking in English.

I suspect he’s taken to having a drink after work. I don’t blame him. He had a new life charted—a teaching gig at an Ivy League, a new wife (me), summer vacations in the fatherland. I wonder if his time in the US now feels parenthetical to a life returned to its former trajectory. Mika doesn’t believe in free will. He’s said that universes in which our lives develop according to plan are likely to exist but are unreachable. So says the math. What I need from him is a clear indication of which life he favors, and whether he’s certain the two of us are living in the same universe. It doesn’t always feel like we are. So says my gut.

I ladle out the soup and slice the hot loaf at a diagonal, then head upstairs and knock on the door to Lilja’s room to call her to dinner. I find her sitting in bed, laptop resting on her bent legs, one cup of her headphones dragged aside to reveal a tender pink ear. She is, in this rare moment, a listening human child.

“Would you like to help me sort through your mother’s clothes this weekend?” I’ve been putting off the question for weeks. “We can save anything you don’t want to donate.”

“Everything,” she says.

“Donate everything?”

“Keep.” She slides the headphone back into place.

Of course, keep. What monster would give them away?

The next morning, after Lilja canters off to school and Mika bicycles to work, I take the train to the nearest IKEA to pick up some portable wardrobes. Here, in the most Scandinavian of settings, I feel like I’ve entered a portal to my local IKEA back home. I walk through the familiar showcase rooms, sit on the plumped and inviting beds, and wish I could fit a bed frame and mattress with me on the train. Mika and I have yet to exchange our two single beds for a new one. I’m living with the arrangement Mika had with his late ex-wife, a light sleeper. Now, the only time we enter each other’s beds is for sex, making it clear who is the one more in need of touch.

I reserve a seat on the return train but find my spot occupied by an older passenger. I stow my bulky purchases, then try to communicate to the woman that she needs to move, showing her the train ticket on my phone. I can’t understand a word of her Finnish and succeed only in flustering her. I try to be reasonable, and am finally helped by a fellow passenger who assists the woman to another carriage. Only then, observing their interaction, do I comprehend that the woman I’ve evicted is mentally disabled. I sit in my shame, listening to the train squeal like a pig as the carriage takes a turn at speed. My reservation was nothing more than a concept I was imposing on physical space. I could have easily taken a spare seat in another carriage. Instead, I feel like the coldhearted foreigner, a failure at carrying out the simplest of tasks. How am I to ever become one of them?

Lilja isn’t yet home from school when I return, nor when I’ve finished assembling the rolling wardrobes. I fill them with her mother’s things freed from my closet, but not before investigating every pocket to make sure I don’t inadvertently turn over anything inappropriate to Lilja. I find nothing. No old letters, no crushed roses, no lockets, no satchel of potpourri, no receipts, no personal keepsakes of any kind. But the keepsakes exist. They’re just larger: the house in Lilja’s name, Lilja, even Mika.

I roll the wardrobes into Lilja’s room, but imagine her dressing in her mother’s things, keeping the loss against her skin for longer than is healthy. I wheel the wardrobes from her room and take them downstairs instead, restraining them as they trundle haltingly down each step. I bring them outside and place them in my studio, a converted garage where Lilja’s mother taught private tango lessons. There’s a sign on the exterior of the building with the silhouette of a man and woman dancing above a phone number that goes nowhere now. The sign is lit day and night. I haven’t found the switch that turns it off.

In the studio I am confronted by the dozen pairs of shoes I picked up weeks ago at the town’s Salvation Army store. My idea had been to position them around the dance studio as though caught in mid-step. Fishing line from above could suspend hats, scarves, and eyeglasses. The floor would be smudged with charcoal shadows. But like the room, my enthusiasm for the rough concept has gone cold. I have a momentary vision of starting over and using Lilja’s mother’s clothes and shoes instead, but the idea is macabre. Perhaps I should use the room to host a support group for other struggling stepmothers.

Back in the house I enter the emptied closet and close the door. I stand in the darkness and imagine that I am the one who has died, that I will never see Mika or Lilja or this house again. Then I let in some light and return to being here, here because someone else died, because a daughter needs her father, because Mika is my husband. I want to set down stronger roots than those, but the ground remains frozen. Unlike Mika and Lilja, I am someone who has someplace to return to that isn’t here, the only one who can leave this new life path. This isn’t comforting. If I’m to be my best self, there needs to be no way out.

I pull up the photos I’ve taken since our move here. Mostly lakes and trees, snow and more snow. I delete every photo, then open the closet door. I photograph the two beds. The stairs. The narrow open refrigerator and the bottle of liquid vitamins and fish oil that I take every morning to ward off winter’s depleting effects. I take a photograph of the therapeutic light panel Mika bought me. A photo of the front door we leave unlocked, even at night, a symbol of Finnish ambivalence to my presence; no one excluded, but no one welcomed, either. Outside, I take a photo of the sign with two silhouettes dancing. I take photos of Lilja and one of her few friends trotting through the gate. Lilja’s gloves are wrapped in duct tape. Her friend punches her fists through fresh snow, an acolyte who moves without Lilja’s grace up the steps and into the house. I take photos of Mika riding in through the gate, the tires of his bicycle weaving two overlapping tracks that look like the path of snakes. I realize I am taking photos to remember this place by. I delete these new photos as well.

When Mika enters my bed that night, I get on all fours but imagine myself continuing off the bed and into the hallway, then down the stairs and outside, my palms impregnated with grit. I imagine summer. Look, the tall grass. Look, the birch trees in full leaf, the nettle behind the studio, the white crowns of wild carrot. I imagine myself a beast of leisure, no longer used for labor or loads but coaxed toward speed and beauty, tomorrow never clouding my mind.

And then I think—what I imagine Lilja must have thought at some point—why not truly become the horse? Continuing on all fours off the bed, I seize the bedroom door’s handle with my mouth and taste the tang of cold metal. I nuzzle the heavy door aside and descend the steps in the dark, but then tumble, fracturing my wrists in two whip cracks of pain. I am human.

During my long recuperation, Lilja assists around the house and helps me with my Finnish. She writes phrases on my casts: statements inked on my left cast, questions on the right, profanity on the rough undersides. Mika comes home earlier during the week and cooks. He helps me dress and undress and makes the new bed in the morning. It’s obvious what I’ve become—a woman whose healing they can affect.

Even after the casts are sawn off, I remember the phrases and their location on my arms, like invisible tattoos hovering above my skin. I practice confrontational therapy on strangers in town, on buses, on trains.

“Sorry. You are in my seat. Please stay. I will take the seat next to you.”

“Would you like to see a picture of my family? Here is Mika. Mika teaches math at the university.”

“Here is a photo of my daughter Lilja. Yes, she is a horse. She can leap many meters.”

“Me? I am a horse mother.”

FRANZ JØRGEN NEUMANN’s stories have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared in The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere.