Mandira Pattnaik, an Indian woman wearing a red blouse with polka dots, smiles and stands in front of a soothing blue background — Mandira Pattnaik

Assistant Editor Kate Jayroe: The rhythm and compression of “Black Beauty” create a meditative and haunting atmosphere. I find myself, with each subsequent read, going ever deeper into a richly equine imaginative space.

Listen to Pattnaik read “Black Beauty:”

Black Beauty

When I am at home alone and, after doing chores, lie down for a bit, I usually unhook my bra. On occasions that I don’t, the feeling, initially, is reassuring—that I am ready if I need to answer the doorbell, or if I need to go out the door at short notice, or if it’s time to fetch my son from his bus stop. But as the minutes tick away, and I am slowly and surely sliding into drowsiness, that feeling is replaced by increasing discomfort. I feel like the straps are cutting through my skin, the steel hook biting into my back, and still later, like I have been put into a harness—the leather stirrups on either side of my body, and the muzzle muffling my mouth. I shake off those thoughts, like they have no business intruding into my earned rest, but they keep at it, nibbling and chewing, making me feel like a domesticated animal, perhaps a trained horse—the only horse I know, almost as if I owned it, is Black Beauty from the childhood classic—and I, that horse, am not left alone in the Terai of the Himalayas but dragged along, down a snaking cobbled path in search of a disinterested pilgrim, one who has no qualms cutting short a pilgrimage on foot by purchasing a trip on my bony back. The thought is disturbing, as I have seen images of how those horses die on the way to the shrine from exhaustion and disease. And then, I’m stopped on the winding paths of my vigorous mind to remember an aunt who loved me dearly when I was a kid and we lived in a large joint family home, but who died of breast cancer in her fifties. A harnessed horse, dead. Did she remember to unhook her bra, or would she have felt it was better having it stifle her?

Mandira Pattnaik‘s recent work has appeared in Emerson Review, IHLR and The Rumpus. She is the author of the novella Where We Set Our Easel (Stanchion Publishing, 2023). More: mandirapattnaik.com