“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…
For the past few years I’ve settled into the rhythm of working on stories in groups of three, mostly so I can turn my back on one that’s being difficult and give my attention to one that’s more appreciative, a way to skirt the discomfort of being stuck. “Horse Mother” was the final story in one such trio. It began with the opening line, “My stepdaughter is a horse,” giving me verb tense, point of view, characters, relationships, and a dilemma to work from. Characters, scenes, and themes emerged, fed every couple of pages by loose lines and collected observations and situations from my notes file that I was happy to see finally set in the amber of a story: Moomins, the culture of hobby horse competitions, the piggish squeal of a train, the tracks of a bicycle in the snow.
That’s one version of how “Horse Mother” came together. Reviewing the notes I took while working on the story, I wrote that the piece “doesn’t have a clear path to a satisfying ending.” Of another draft, I wrote, “doesn’t have sufficient conflict, flow, or urgency.” In a double-digit draft, “The pacing at the end is off.” And even later, a judgment you don’t want to have this far into revisions: “The story feels bloated and unbalanced.” Hilariously, I have no memory of having felt this way, but it’s the record of the story I trust more, the one that shows that with enough drafts, a story’s issues can be resolved—a kind of shadow to the narrator’s arrival at a kind of peace.
When I came back to the story, scenes were cut, names changed. Bones were broken, then mended. Frustratingly, the ending still wasn’t there, and then, many drafts later, as Lilja reached for a pen to write Finnish phrases on her stepmother’s cast, it was.
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.
