Big Swiss(98)

Greta waved her arms. “Are you dreaming? What straitjacket?”

“Guilt,” Om said. “Your guilt is a straitjacket.”

“Then why do I feel so… unfettered? I’m flopping around all over the place.”

“You’re struggling to break free,” Om said. “It takes an enormous amount of energy—and courage—to free yourself, to follow the path of transformation without abandoning yourself, without fleeing from your pain and all the loss you’ve experienced. But you need to have more compassion for yourself. That’s what’s missing. It’s no accident that this is happening now, after you’ve transcribed so many sessions for me. In a sense, you’ve been in therapy with me for many months. Hold on, I see it, Greta, I got it.”

He raised his eyebrows and held out his hand. The glass glinted in the light. Sadly, it was only slightly bigger than a grain of sand.

“That’s not it,” Greta said, and rolled her eyes.

“The rest is in your head, honey. We’ll deal with it next time.”

Phantom glass, Greta thought. Kill me.





19


She didn’t realize how miniature they were until they showed up in a minivan. They bounded out the side door, tails swinging, and began munching grass in the yard. The jack was tan with white spots; the jennet, a moody gray. They were only three feet tall and a little over two hundred pounds, less than half the size of regular donkeys, but their ears were a good five inches long, nearly as long as their faces, and stood straight up. Unlike horses, they had short, spiky manes and no bangs. Their asses were boxy, their knees knobby, and they both had crosses on their backs—a dark stripe running the length of their spines crossed with another over their shoulders—and so it was hard not to think of Jesus when you saw them, Thy cross I’ll carry and so on, and to remember that they were beasts of burden, though these two didn’t look like they could carry more than a bag of groceries.

If she were a different sort of person, she would have said they seemed magical. Like unicorns. But whereas unicorns were symbols of purity and grace and could only be tamed by virgins, these guys devoured gingersnaps straight out of Greta’s impure hand while leaning against her bare legs.

She watched them chase each other around a tree, bucking their back legs and farting at the same time. Their farts were loud and endearing, as was the sound of their slow, thoughtful chewing, which made Greta’s spine and scalp tingle.

Their ears were extremely mobile. They rotated almost 180 degrees and were moving constantly. It seemed obvious they used them to communicate, though Greta didn’t know what they were saying yet. All she knew was that their presence had obvious physiological and psychological benefits, like forest bathing in Japan. When their ears rotated in Greta’s direction, she felt a sense of deep well-being, along with the urge to reproduce them in some way. She could render them in pencil, perhaps. Or pastry dough? Donkey Ears: éclair-like pastries filled with chocolate custard and topped with a crunchy croustillant made from pistachios, pralines, and… holy shit, was she stoned? Why was she thinking like this?

“Ellington,” Sabine said, snapping her fingers. “That’s the jack’s name.”

He was an obvious extrovert, as affectionate as a lapdog, and very vocal, though his bray sounded like a deaf man bellowing. The jennet was the opposite: quiet, deerlike, and demure, with lustrous, false-looking eyelashes. She had an Amish quality, seemed both sober and humble, but with an irrepressible glamour.

“What about her?” Greta said.

“Pantaloon,” Sabine said.

Ellington and Pantaloon kept stomping their feet as if to test how solid the ground was, or to make sure they weren’t dreaming. Compared with the donkey farm, which Greta imagined as bleak and smelly, their new home was heaven. Plenty to browse in the yard and field, all the peonies in bloom, butterflies everywhere, two laughing women feeding them apples and carrots. They were probably pinching themselves.

“Do you deliver donkeys all over New York?” Greta asked the driver, who stood nearby.

“Not around here, usually,” he said. “But I have three myself and I live thirty minutes from here, in Tivoli.”

“Is it true they can’t be alone? I mean, if the jack died, god forbid, would the jennet kill herself?”

“Mini-donkeys need each other,” he said. “They prefer to be among their own kind—other mini-donkeys, that is, not just goats or sheep or whatever. If they’re alone for too long, they get sick and die.”

He seemed reluctant to leave. At first Greta thought he was waiting for a tip, but when Sabine offered him money, he waved it away. He was somewhere in his thirties, and also looked Amish, or maybe it was just his collarless, off-white linen shirt. His shorts were that shade of brown everyone was so hard for—clay, it might have been called, or terra-cotta. He was tall, blue eyed, looked like a Gunter or Hans, and was clearly more than just a donkey chauffeur. It occurred to her that he genuinely cared about the donkeys, wanted to make sure he wasn’t leaving them with a couple of rejects.

“What’s your name?” Greta asked him.

“Dave,” he said.

“Are you a farmer?” Greta asked.

“Farrier,” he said.

Greta looked away. What the hell was a farrier?