Down in the cellar, I find a forgotten toy horse on a wheeled platform. She's not glued on, but sunk in it, trapped at the ankles as if in quicksand.

Only... the toy horse is alive! She's Silky, the wild mare who's my anima--and lover. My spirit wife. How'd she shrink to this?

I'm troubled by how she's bound. And, well, guiltily excited. Like coming home to find your lover naked, spread-eagled, cuffed wrist and ankle to your bed...

So I stroke her, this tiny, living, talking mare: my wife. She squirms, sexy, impatient... angry with me.

"You abandoned me here. You want human girls with normal legs now, don't you."

She wants to go with me into the big world, she wants... well, a lot of things. To be on TV, the star of her own cartoon or puppet show. I feel sad, hearing her hopeless ambitions.

"You're talented, but with your legs stuck in that platform you're not gonna dance, or even walk on your own. You can't be the next Gumby." Oops, a slip of the tongue. I meant Gumby's best friend Pokey the plasticine horse. She has no hope of even achieving... Gumby.

Silky says "You could cut the platform off, to free my legs."

"Then you'd have short legs: they don't go down to the hooves. The wheels give you the proper height. You're just not built for independent freedom of movement."

"You could cut out pieces of the platform below my legs, and CARVE hooves."

I see what she means: cylindrical cuts with a jigsaw. If done with care, I could leave hooves, or at least ankles on which to glue or nail hooves. But not an easy cut--I only have a manual saw, with not too fine a blade. Lot of delicate work!

And her whole body, including the platform, is just eight inches high--does she really have a chance to become a star in this shape?

Or is she right? Is my skepticism just because I really don't want to be bothered? She's wrong about these human girls she imagines--I don't have a girlfriend out there, and I don't care much either. I want Silky! But full-sized again, alive and kicking, free.

NOTES ON WAKING

• Wooden horse = yesterday I heard "Kaspar Hauser's Song" by Suzanne Vega, based on Kaspar Hauser, a boy locked in cellar most of his life, whose toy horse became more or less his soul: "What was wood became alive..."
• So Silky = my soul! I'm embarrassed by the truth of my own soul, as neglected as Kaspar Hauser's...
• The platform = habit? My childhood habits of self-deprivation?
• Silky, my spirit wife, who often manifests as a horse in dreams, WAS originally a construct, a side of me I pieced together from watching others who had the free, playful ease I lacked after a hellish childhood. Now she's come alive in me: but she needs a last bit done to free her, before she/I can perform in public. I'm just afraid to risk the operation. But I have to. She wants it, and her life is the one at stake. Literally at stake--staked out, and left to die in a cellar. That's how I've been treating her.

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