Pony Island

There’s this island full of ponies. You’ve probably heard of it. But it’s not what you imagine. It’s weird. Like, deserted and dirty and all of the ponies seem emaciated and sad and you’re allowed to touch them but why would you want to. The island has a long name that I can’t remember. I went there when I was maybe fourteen years old. I remember the age because I had this hat. It was green and huge on my head and truly ugly. But I loved it. And I wore it when I went to see the ponies on the weird/gross island with the name I can’t remember. I brought a guitar that was too small. Made for the child I no longer was. My baby brother was there too. I don’t call him that anymore because he’s taller than me and has a low voice and a beard. But back then, on the decrepit island with the shaggy smelly ponies, my baby brother was tiny. Back then he took Ritalin--this was before he smoked weed--and he never ate food and he complained constantly and threw fits in my mom’s minivan on the way to the island with the ponies.

We went to the island in the winter, by the way. That’s not their tourist season. There were all these pictures of horses prancing along the beach at sunset. That’s not what we got. We got horseflies and empty concession stands and, of course, smelly disgusting nowhere-near-magical ponies.

I wasn’t a little girl anymore. That’s the thing. I could have written this story as if I’d been seven years old at the time, and everything was sparkly and unreal, and I was blind to the foulness. But that’s not how it happened. What happened, really, was that I sat in the passenger seat the whole four hour drive there, and my baby brother wined about it the whole time, and my mother promised a magical pony experience that we were both already too old for, and anyway, the ponies would ultimately disappoint us all.

I spent the whole drive texting. I don’t remember what the highways looked like or what my mom looked like as she drove. I often struggle to picture my mother’s face. I don’t even remember what the phone screen looked like or which phone I had at the time. I remember waiting anxiously, looking at nothing, for a boy that would one day break my heart to respond to a conspicuously prying text that I’d planned and sent at the particular time of day when he was most likely to respond. I remember the absence of his response. Perhaps this colored my experience of the ponies. But when I look at pictures, later on, I think my memory must be spot on.

The ponies on the island are not wild. That’s a misconception. Really, they are feral. They were domesticated once and now they are neglected and that’s why they roam the streets. They are not free, they are homeless. They are a starving, desperate tourist attraction. And really, no, you are not supposed to feed them. And people do, but why would you want to?

I went back to the island once, later when I was older and no longer wore hats. It was with a man. A boy. He had a full, adult size guitar and a video camera. He was a man/boy who had once loved me but by the time we went to see the ponies he no longer did. Love me that is. I have a picture of him holding his guitar around his neck, in the center of a circle of sad, anxious ponies. He played them songs that they surely could not comprehend or appreciate. He asked me to record it with his video camera. Then he took a picture of me standing at the edge of the swamp on the outskirts of the dilapidated island full of ponies. He edited the picture later so that all the grass looked red and angry. That is not what the pony island looked like, nor is it how I felt standing at the edge of the pony swamp. The boy/man did not understand me at all.

There is another picture from the first trip to the island of ponies. It is a picture of a fence. A canted angle with too much contrast. There is no person or pony in the picture. It is just a long, long fence, somewhere on the pony island, or maybe somewhere along the way to the pony island, there’s no way to be sure. It had been my mother’s idea to take the picture of the fence. She said, on this trip we’re taking pictures of fences. A project. I have hundreds of pictures on my old point-and-shoot digital camera of pony-adjacent fences. When I think of the run-down island of starved, neglected, smelly feral ponies, the first image I conjure is an unidentifiable fence with my mother’s shadow coloring the photo’s edge.

Hannah Silverman is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker. She earned her BFA in Film & Television with a minor in Creative Writing from NYU. She is an Editorial Assistant at Pigeon Pages literary journal, where her prose has been published. Her work is forthcoming in 3Elements Review.