The Therapy Pony

Rewritten and rerecorded.

MUSIC:

Leo Ornstein Piano Sonata No. 4, Mv. II

Content Warning:

Sex references, injury detail

Transcript

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The Therapy Pony

I

It was decided that Bryan the Therapy Pony was to be brought onto the campus in May. The loveliness of the weather touched everything in the world with a pleasant, positive glow. On surfaces of green and hopeful grass, populated with couples and groups and individuals enjoying the sun, there were many shadows, attached as though at the ankles, to everything that moved. The skies were wide and blue, often cloudless. Many birds sang. 

As agreed, in middle May, Gus brought Bryan the Therapy Pony to the main green on campus. In the carpark, Gus parked his little van, the equine carrier attached behind. He unbolted the door of the carrying vehicle and slid it to the left. Out stepped Bryan the Therapy Pony into the sun, in four efficient trots, each one sounded out by the dense, dry knock of a hoof. Bryan cocked his head and looked about suspiciously. Gus patted a patch on Bryan’s rump with expert firmness. Bryan nickered softly. Gus knew exactly which regions of Bryan’s brown body to rub or slap in pacification. 

The bond between Gus and Bryan was a strong one, mystifying to both parties and yet deeply felt and shared. Gus wasn’t a man of land, agriculture, equestrian sports, nor was he a part of the therapeutic profession. In fact he regarded the word “Wellness” with considerable disdain….he took great pride in the fact that he had never, according to his lights, ever once been “well” in his entire life. Anyway, not for him but for the younger, more hopeful others, Wellness was the aspiration, the project for which Bryan the Therapy Pony had been commandeered. From Gus’ point of view, he was amazed at the sums the so-called Wellness and Pastoral committees were willing to give him for the healing pleasure of a therapy pony’s company. 

Gus was an old, unmarried man. He was in his early seventies and in fairly good shape. He moved with an alacrity, a loose, fluent demeanour. But he was also cantankerous, full of a quite septuagenarian grumpiness. In early middle age he had come close to marrying. But he had let the opportunity pass him by, and the prospect of marriage now seemed gone for good. He was a retired crash investigator, public transport disasters, planes, helicopters, trains, trams, buses. He had chosen his career over marriage. When he retired from his profession, whose traumatic and painstaking investigations he had never consciously loved but had repeatedly thrown himself into with great fervour, love was no longer there to be explored. 

            Loneliness had begun to suffuse his existence. In his late sixties, he had started to feel the insidious creep of solitude. And mortality. So he’d purchased a pony for sentient company. When Bryan expired, if it was before Gus, Gus was resolved to put an end to himself on that very day, using something lethal in his private cupboards and drawers.   

Bryan was a handsome Shetland Pony: his withers stood almost exactly a metre above the ground, his coat lay heavy on flesh that was not fat, and the bulky engine of the stomach with its handsome under-curve sat, a little sagging, but taut and supported, on his sturdy, little legs. He was almost exactly the colour of chocolate, sunlight brought out the apricot in him, in darker weathers he was a shade that approximated onion marmalade. His silken mane was not of a fairer shade- as many Shetland Pony manes are- but precisely the same as the rest of his body: it was quite thick, even luxuriant, but well kempt and combed.

            Gus had visited the campus a number of times before as part of wellness programmes, with Bryan, the Therapy Pony of some repute. Without Bryan, Gus was nothing. Participants from the student body (and on occasion the staff body) seemed to love Bryan, had found him well-suited to animal therapy. It was usually during the summer exam period that they dropped Bryan’s custodian an email of invitation and this year had been no different. They adored Bryan, Gus not so much. But they were quite willing to deal with him to secure the privilege of Bryan’s company. Gus was apparently polite but contemptuous beneath his courtesy, and this unpleasantness sometimes came out in his attitude, a certain truculence, or shortness. Bryan was not an especially warm pony, Gus knew (even if the others didn’t) that his deep dark eyes betrayed a certain loathing, or at least a certain indifference, towards the hordes of the presumably unwell, afflicted, distressed who sought to be well again by pawing and fondling him for therapeutic purposes.

           Without ropes, Gus accompanied Bryan across the campus, never leading him. He kept Bryan's pace calm not with reins but with the simple comforting firmness of his being there, occasionally stroking the downward length of the mane or caressing the slope of his muzzle. Bryan trotted at a level pace across the carpark and onto the main green, which was an area for recline and relaxation, encroached upon by various student union buildings. It was a beautiful patch: trees, benches, a lake. The distant cacophony of waterfowl pricked Bryan’s ears, honking geese, chattering mallards. Gus had with him a bag of foodstuffs for feeding Bryan, and a saddle and set of stirrups too. These latter two weren’t really necessary, but Gus wasn’t willing to risk arse-ache. He had once forgotten to properly saddle Bryan: something had caused him to bolt, the child seated upon him at the time was almost very seriously injured. Gus had learned his lesson. 

            Pablo, who ran the university wellness clinic, was already on the lawn. He saw the man and the pony he had been expecting coming across the green, turning heads and arousing comment as they went, and he waved cheerfully at them both. Gus recognised Pablo and reluctantly waved in reply. They all converged, Pablo, Gus, Bryan.

            “Hello lovely Bryan,” Pablo cried out, reaching for the crown of the pony’s hairy head and caressing it with a flat palm.

            Bryan quietly whinnied, acknowledging the unusual hand. He had encountered Pablo a number of times, but it takes time to know a pony, and Bryan still regarded Pablo as a stranger. Pablo’s shirt was covered in images of thermometers, a strange, busy design. The shirtsleeves billowed lazily in the breeze, and the undone top two or three buttons down the middle revealed copious chest hair, in which three or four medallions lay coiled.

“How long do you want Bryan for?” Gus asked.

            “Oh, about three hours, I’d say…” Pablo answered.

            Bryan depressed his head and joylessly enjoyed the grass. Whether or not he was in the mood for grass, grass always seemed to exert a pull he couldn’t resist. He tore off dispassionate mouthfuls, and horizontally ground them to mush in his heavy, square jaws, sniffling contentedly all the while. His mouth emitted a humid, grassy stink as it worked.

“Same drill as usual then?” Gus asked.

            “Yeah,” Pablo assured. “People know he’s here, he’s always popular. They’ll come…”

            “…and I just supervise while they…touch him, pass the time with him, get to know him…”

            “Yes, exactly.”

            Gus wondered what it would be like to be handled and touched and prodded and stroked and fondled just for people’s relaxation. He pitied Bryan’s plight, even as he subjected him to it, quite willingly, for his own financial gain. Bryan continued to chew the grass.

            “Can I ask about payment…?” Gus enquired.

            “The guild can do direct bank transfer within the week…is that satisfactory?”

            Gus preferred cheque or cash on the day of services performed. “Quite satisfactory. Thank you,” Gus answered.

            People became gradually aware of Bryan’s presence. They hurried over to him and were vocally moved by his beauty. Faces, mostly of young women, congregated about him dizzyingly as they oohed and aahed at the flashing silk of his mane, and the depth of those two slow-blinking, glossy eyes. Pablo warmly took care of the welcoming and hosting; Gus stood at the periphery, keeping grim vigil all the while.

            Gus was amazed at how many people amassed for this particular visit. On no other occasion had such a crowd assembled. Invariably it was women who joined the queue, but not exclusively. It almost made him laugh, how devoted their homage to that little animal, how strong their faith in the remedial possibility of close contact with him, of close congress with the warm, firm flesh. Women came up, bent down, sank to their knees, pressed their cheeks, noses, ears, even their wet eyes into the curved, plump, lovely tummy or the softly shining mane, in intimate worship. They caressed his flanks, and his rump where the pendular tail swung back and forth, and they tickled his ears too. Bryan just went on munching the grass, his expression deadpan and unparticipating. He seemed ever oblivious to his adorers’ assaults, never looking any of them in the eye. Only one girl seemed intent upon receiving eye-contact from him. She parked her face right up against his, and tried to force his head up and his eyes straight ahead where her loud, freckled complexion might be discovered. Bryan resisted, preferring the company of the grass; then he stuck out his tongue and gave her a big, wet lick. She stumbled back, reeling, laughing.

            “Who wants to feed him a pear chunk?” Gus said.

            A host of hands went up. Gus put a pear chunk into each palm and they all went up and offered their morsel to the large, certain jaws. Bryan never rejected food: he grabbed hold of each chunk with his big baggy lips, slurping it from the hand that offered it right into the gnash of his powerful, liquifying teeth and down the broad gullet into the churning cauldron of his belly. Pablo watched each encounter, his smile beatific, rictus. In their individual component, the crowds that had turned up to avail themselves of Bryan’s tactile therapies, did not seem to Gus especially stressed, anxious, depressed, or traumatised, but three hundred pounds was not to be sniffed at, even for performing such odd, nauseating services as these.

            Bryan was eventually worn out by all the fuss and attention, and constant mastication. Swollen with grass and pear chunks, he wearily sagged, got down onto the grassy ground, rolled onto his side, and slept. So as to rouse him, since they were still on the clock, Gus took out a small switch from his bag. Pablo wrang his hands and urged Gus to leave the pony be. Gus retired the switch. Then, in odd solidarity, Pablo got down onto the grass and lay next to Bryan. He curled up and spooned, almost conjugally, with the beautiful creature. Following Pablo’s example, all those in attendance quite suddenly fell in a unified gesture to the floor, and lay in a pile, in the sleepy May sunlight. Gus stared bemusedly down at the spread of young people, all lying prone, by his boots. They were all knit into one somnolent enchantment by Bryan the Therapy Pony, the warm, bellied source of the magic. His stomach rose and fell, and rose, in slow big breaths. 

Gus thought the sight looked a bit like an accident, or a mass suicide. Through the frown of his unhappy, folded eyes, he reckoned the whole affair to be quite contemptible. He was contemptible for inflicting this touchy feely torture upon his beloved Bryan, and he was contemptible for so happily accepting remuneration for it.  He was contemptible in the first place for sharing Bryan at all, for sharing the beauty he cherished so personally in that bushy, Northerly pony. The three hours was mercifully close to expiry.

            “Right…wakey time…everybody up…pony therapy’s over…get back to your…whatever it is you do all day…come on…up, up!”

            Gus woke everyone up, including Bryan, who took a few careful rump-slaps to be reanimated and rise onto his feet. His legs wobbled, he let out a capacious yawn, followed by a treble, feeble neigh. Then he cocked his head alertly and refocused. Bryan and Gus bade Pablo and the students farewell and then returned, at a relieved, moderate canter, to the carpark. They drove home.

II        

The evening sprawled beautifully. The world was perfectly warm, almost breezeless but not quite. The distant hills slumbered peacefully, and the fuzzy wheatfields, dotted with the bold paper skirts of poppy flowers, lay patient and solar, shadowed in evening clouds. 

Gus returned Bryan to his pen, gave him some water, and then reclined, at ease, in the garden hammock. He smoked a joint, then ate his dinner. 

He didn’t notice it at first, but he gradually registered a change in Bryan’s demeanour. Normally so imperious and imposing despite his small size for an equine, he now seemed lost and servile and apprehensive as the daylight disappeared and the night began to turn starry. It troubled Gus, the way he saw Bryan standing…awake, bleak, catatonically anxious, under the stars. He went to the pen, leaned over the fence, and gave his pony a few comforting slaps, as though to break the icy, wakeful spell in which he was trapped. Gus yawned. He was tired. He had an early start the next day. A secondary-school fete wished to avail themselves of Bryan and Gus’s therapy pony services. Gus resolved that he would soon give up pony therapy, he would pack it in, like an unhealthy habit. But it just paid so damn well, and was such easy work.

Off Gus went to bed. Remembered soft twenty-year-old faces crept upon him from the darkness. He began to masturbate but ceased, finding climax impossibly remote. Sleep stole over him soon enough, and the soft faces withdrew.

The following morning, at about six o’clock, Gus was woken by a strange bellowing. He grimaced with vexation and curiosity as he stirred, feeling as stiff as a broomstick. He left his bed and ventured outside, standing on the porch, and looking out over the garden, and at the golden distance beyond. The morning was tranquil and bright but abominably disturbed by this hoarse growling and shrieking. Gus suddenly pinpointed the source of the pitiful cacophony, and was afraid. He went over to Bryan’s pen and looked inside.

Bryan was on his back, and his legs writhing. He looked so helpless, like a baby. It was indescribable and it was soul-scarring, the constant, plaintive wail that he emitted like a whistling kettle, from thick-lipped jaws open in pathos, and the ham-like tongue operatically waggling between. Gus hurried over to Bryan, opening the gate and leaving it open, and was horrified by what he saw up close. 

            Bryan’s eyelids were puffy and crusted, his eyes were folded away like those of a rabbit with myxomatosis. His belly, that had been so smooth and level only yesterday, was carbuncled in sores and pustules. Gus peered inside the ajar jaws, trying to glimpse the uvular or oesophageal source of that terrible moaning note. He was mystified and appalled to find the gums and the tip of the tongue splashed in a painful looking white and yellowish thrush. Then, an enormous belch rumbled low in Bryan’s belly, shot up his throat, and erupted pungently from his mouth. The stink that hit Gus right on the nose was unbelievable, a smell of sickness and rancidity.

            “No no no! Bryan!” Gus cried. He placed a hand on Bryan’s abdomen. Bryan farted. The morning seemed oblivious to the guttural, sudden sound. A magpie rattled somewhere, a cock coughed. “Bryan, you can’t do pony therapy in this condition. Look at you! You’re repulsive, Bryan. You’d have to pay people to touch you.” 

The vet was summoned and made his examinations. He investigated the afflicted body, listened to its heartbeat through his stethoscope, felt the body in his hands in the places where particular pathologies might tell.

            “Nothing wrong with him,” the vet concluded, zipping up his medical bag.

            “Nothing wrong with him? But, for Christ’s sake, look at him!”

            “Stress, I would say. Psychosomatic symptoms of stress. That’s all it is.”

            The irony was not lost on Gus, but he was too incensed to be amused by it.

            “Couple of days of rest, plenty of fluids,” the vet assured. “He’ll be right as rain in a jiffy.”

III

The vet’s prognosis was exactly right. As hastily as they had appeared, the unpleasant and putrid symptoms vanished. It was a banal recovery from a flying visit of nameless, arbitrary ailment. Gus apologised to the organisers of the secondary school fete for he and Bryan’s absence; Bryan’s frightful sickness was a good excuse as excuses went. Bryan spent most of the week flat, at rest on the floor of his pen, as the sun crossed the sky and his shadow wheeled, as Gus dutifully brought him fruit-mash and warm water. Gus was quite certain that it was Bryan’s subjection to pony therapy that had caused his sickness, a sickness that- though very temporary- had been quite horrifying. It was as though in every place he had been touched, wounds and sores and goitres had flowered.

About a week later, Gus received an email from Pablo at the university: could Gus bring Bryan onto the campus for more pony therapy, due to popular demand. Gus forgot all his reservations and scruples, and emailed to say that he could, that he would be delighted. Tuesday, 18th? Yes.

Without reins, Gus walked with a recovered Bryan through the carpark, onto the main green. The proud form of the recovered pony, maned, head held high, turned heads. They all stared after him in something more sinister and condescending than rapture. 

            Once again, Gus and Bryan were received by Pablo on the green, on a spot quite close to the lake this time. It was a majority mallard lake- a moorhen infrequently beeped, a swan silently sailed in endless circles. The ducks produced an unbroken, attention-seeking racket. As far as human beings, there were fewer of them than last time. The people present were few and sparsely scattered.

            “I’ve actually got to go and run a workshop this afternoon, Gus, so are you alright to take care of proceedings yourself?”

            “Certainly,” Gus replied.

            “Please call this number if there are any incidents, that includes mental health incidents like panic attacks…” Pablo handed Gus a little card with a phone number and a website on it. 

            “Okay…” said Gus. 

            “People know where you are…I’ll see you later…”

            “Bye,” Gus said. And off Pablo went. 

            Bryan had already depressed his head and was zealously eating grass.

            They were alone for a while. They sat, enjoying the peace, the relative quiet. The ducks were occasionally thrown into a collective paroxysm by some breadcrumbs. At the water’s edge, a professor appeared with a big loaf of bread under his arm. Gus watched him for a time. He hardly moved, stood motionless for whole minutes at a time. Every so often, he broke off a piece of bread and tossed it into the water. He gazed at the hungry frenzy of the ducks like a torturer. Elsewhere, voices continually disturbed the stillness, various brief shouts and hollers, isolated diminuendos of laughter. Bryan continued to grind the grass in his jaws, his head lowered.   

            Then, a customer materialised. She came from the main forum, where the largest lecture theatre and the library were located. She made for Gus and Bryan with great intention, hurriedly traversing the wide lawn. As the young woman came near, avid for pony therapy, Gus noticed how beautiful she was. There were lots of obviously beautiful young women on the campus, but this woman was more beautiful than them. Gus eyed her, her fairness, her paleness…he was an old man, brown with sun and age, creased with work and sadness. He felt forty years younger as his eyes drank her beauty. If only he were a pony! He could get down on all fours beside her, share the measure of her beating heart, feel his firmness touched by the soft healing voyage of her touch, lick her face, and nibble her knees. And she would forgive him all of it, because he was just a pony, not a man! 

She approached and Gus composed himself, masking his passions, and they small-talked. Then, clasping her cheeks, now flushed with passional red, she cried:

“Oh, he’s lovely. I just love Shetland ponies. I love being close to animals. Any animals. I love to be reminded that there’s such a world beyond us, such a…a kind of…a depth deeper than our depths…do you know what I mean?” She was light and gregarious.

            Gus replied only curtly. He gazed at her in great rapture. After a moment he was able to encourage her:

            “Go on…touch him however you like…he’s very well trained. He’s a therapy pony. He’s quite used to being touched.”

            “Oh, wonderful…” she bent down and moved towards him, a little cooly.

            “Go on…snuggle right up to him,” Gus urged

.

            “I will…”

            She began to stroke his right flank in feeble, weedy strokes.

            “Don’t be afraid of him. Be quite firm. He responds to firmness.”

            She continued to touch him in her withholding way. Gus joined in, guiding her hand in his. Her hand was so soft and small. He leaned in closer, guiding her hand all the while. It seemed almost to Gus that Bryan was an extension of him, a part of him that could be appropriately touched. It was almost exactly as though Gus and Bryan were one, a complete being made of two disparate but complementing halves. As Gus continued guiding the girl’s hand, Bryan softly neighed, as though to give voice to Gus’s pleasure. He moved in a little closer. The woman stood, bent, innocently and unwittingly trapped between the two male bodies, the pony before her and the old man behind her. She was locked in. It was a risk, this closeness, but still she did not protest. Gus leaned in even closer, and just as the beginnings of her hanging hair touched his nose, so he smelt the naturally emanating perfume, the smell like crushed petals that seemed to find its source at the blonde roots.

            “What are you doing?” she said, turning her head sharply.

            “What?”

            “What are you…”

            “Nothing, nothing…” Gus protested.

            He quickly and ashamedly retreated, letting her go. But she was rattled and wary.

            “What the fuck were you doing?” she cried, standing up, her hand already withdrawn from the furry, apricot pelt.

She continued to protest, and Gus to repudiate. 

Bryan went on serenely chewing the grass, his mane rippling in the wind. He seemed somehow aware of what was taking place beside him. His eyes seemed somehow cognizant but they were not sagacious, they were not deep with ancient knowing: he was quite dumb, innocent of human affairs, the complex rituals of touch and contact, though he had such extensive experience of being touched. Gradually, his jaws slowed. He stopped eating the grass. He began to lift his long head, thoughtfully. It rose up, eerily. 

The girl threatened to call the campus security, the police, and the assault helpline. Bryan’s head was fully raised. His eyes lighted with the delicious quickening of some new resolve, and he galloped on the spot, testing the strength of his hooves. Then, quite without warning, before Gus’ horrified watch, he lunged at the girl. A scream shot from her like a flash of light, startling the mallards into cacophonous flight. The swan, too, lifted, and loped through the air on wild, effortful wings towards the sun, not looking back at what took place. 

The girl, knocked supine, lay darkened in the shadow of the therapy pony, his entire body elevated diagonally on his hind-legs. The last thing she saw was the ferocious plummet of those great hooved feet. He crushed her skull. The shock that went through him was so hard and new and sudden that he stumbled back from the corpse.

Gus pulled the body by its legs towards the lake and pushed it over the bank where it sank quickly down. The waters were dark, swallowing, and obedient. They devoured the body without delay. A pair of froggish eyes opened and watched, white, from the liquid blackness, thanking the deliverer for the cadaver. 

“Shhh,” Gus said, placing a finger on his lips as he made eye-contact with the professor who had been torturing the ducks. The professor mirrored Gus and Gus was relieved that the man seemed content to help keep this butchery a secret, for as long as it could remain a secret anyway.    

Brain and bone and blood flecked Bryan’s hooves, and lay splattered up the stout columns of his legs, his haunches, and all over his underside, even on his flanks. Bryan went right back to the grass, lowering his head to eat it.

           The ducks re-alighted. They settled upon the water and resumed their insistent quacking. The shy moorhen peeped out from a patch of bullrush stems: his black face frowned: Yeeeeeeeeeeeap! he cried. The swan was nowhere to be seen.

            With all his being, Gus resisted the urge to run. Two girls in spectacles came walking by, leaving behind the dirt-path that curved around the lake. They noticed Bryan, contentedly munching the grass.

            “Hello,” Gus said to them. “This is Bryan, the therapy pony.”

            Together, the two women looked like a couple, or sisters. They looked at each other quizzically. One of them spoke, in a foreign accent:

            “What is a therapy pony?”

            He attempted to enlighten them, a little shaky and uncertain in his role as a welcomer. 

            The professor trudged home, putting away his bread. He chuckled while he walked, feeling pacified, and also quite tickled by the brutality he had observed.