Uchenna's Apples Read Online Free PDF Page B

mouthfuls of grass from the ground. Fine. As long as they’re biting the grass and not me —
    She came down and turned right around. As she did, once more the horses’ heads came up. “Uh oh…” Uchenna said.
    But nothing else happened for the moment, except the horses’ jaws went around and around while they chewed their last mouthfuls and stared at the girls. Uchenna wasn’t anywhere near feeling relaxed, but she leaned against the gate and looked the horses over, fairly certain she wasn’t going to have to run away just now.
    They looked nothing like the horses that Uchenna sometimes saw on the racing channel that her dad watched on weekend afternoons. Those were glossy creatures with long slender legs, narrow heads, straight noses and flowing tails. These horses were big-barreled, with heavyish legs, outward-curving noses, and big broad hooves plastered with dried mud: some of the hooves had long straggly dirty hair hanging down behind them. And the horses weren’t all one color, like the racehorses usually were. They were patchy, with big blotches of color on them, mostly black on white: though a couple of them had brown patches that overlapped the black ones in places. All of them had big dark eyes that seemed to be looking at Uchenna and Emer almost sadly: but it looked like a patient hopeless sort of sorrow, the kind that would just sigh at life and say “Oh well.”
    “They really are big,” Uchenna said under her breath. When they shifted, you could feel the thump of their hooves against the ground. “Specially that one.”
    She pointed with her chin at the one horse that wasn’t patchy-colored, just dingy white. The horse’s belly was twice the size of those of the other horses, and hung down further: when the horse moved, it did so slowly, as if all that weight was a burden.
    “Yeah, which reminds me,” Emer said. “When’s your mam’s due date?”
    “That reminds you?” Uchenna said, shocked.
    Emer gave Uchenna a you-poor-innocent kind of look. “Chen,” she said, “that’s a mammy horse. Or she’s gonna be a mammy real soon. What’d you think, that she’d just been hitting the chips too hard?”
    Uchenna went hot. “Look,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell the boys from the girls with these guys. They’re not exactly my main subject.”
    “The boys have boy stuff hanging down,” Emer said, pointing. “Or most of it. See that one’s butt? They took them off. It’s called ‘gelding’, it makes them not go crazy around the girls.”
    Uchenna raised her eyebrows, thinking that there were some boys at school who should be told about this technique, if only to see the looks on their faces. “So we’ve got one, two…three guys.”
    “And two girls. Maybe the other girl is a friend of the mammy’s.”
    “Well, they get apples first,” Uchenna said.
    Each of them cautiously threw an apple toward the mammy horse and her friend. The horses started with surprise: the mammy horse’s friend, mostly black with a white nose, actually reared up on her hind legs a little to get away from the apple, and at the big sudden motion a flush of terror went right over Uchenna in a wave. But a moment later the horses quieted down and stood still again, and looked at the apples suspiciously.
    “Come on, guys,” Uchenna said under her breath, “you think we hauled these all the way over here for our health?” She took another apple out of the bag and rolled it over toward one of the boy horses, one who was mostly white with a black patch on his back like a saddle, and had a black nose-end. When it stopped rolling, he looked at it, then dropped his nose to it and smelled it, making a loud whuffly noise. “Eames,” Uchenna said, watching him, “how come they’re all so shaggy? I didn’t know horses came like that.”
    Emer shrugged. “It’s like people,” she said: “you have to give them haircuts every now and then. Also I think when you leave them out in the open a lot, the