The Year of the Horses

Courtney Maum

eAudio - 2022

There it was: the peat smell of an ending summer, oiled leather, hay wet with rain. The horse was as black as the sharp keys on a piano with magnificent brown eyes. My heart sang out to this great beast, and he answered with a toot through his gigantic nostrils. I was dressed. The horse was tacked. It was time to go.Courtney Maum is thirty-seven-years-old when she finds herself in an indoor arena in Connecticut, moments away from stepping back into the saddle. For her, this is not just a riding lesson but a last-ditch attempt to pull herself back from the brink, even though riding is a relic from the past she walked away from. She hasn't been on or near a horse in over thirty years.Although Maum does know what depression looks like, sh...e finds herself refusing to admit, at this point in her life, that it could look like her: a woman with a mortgage, a husband, a healthy child, and a published novel. That she feels sadness is undeniable, but she feels no right to... more