The first earthquake, and my neighbor’s barn, once filled with milking cows and Iberian horses, splinters apart. His livestock tentatively exit into dawn, panting thick clouds so white I think they breathe the bodies of new ghosts.

I stand as the wave passes and call for him; he whistles his health to me from his open doorway. It is bright, so even through the distance I can make out a pulse in his silhouette. My home too lifted itself from its foundation. Inside, I gather clean water and grain. Outside, I go to him. “Did you see the grasslands shudder?” he asks. We leave before the volcano can erupt, before Puyehue slides her proboscis of smoke into the sky and turns the clouds’ underbellies to ripples, before she can challenge winter.

Flycatchers spill from the next rise in spindles of sunlit ice and feathers. “I once worked with wings,” he says, leading one pregnant horse and me down an empty road, south. “So I know birds. Their’s is the most manual of labor. It’s difficult to fly.”

The second quake, and the horses disappear through the trees. Oscar forgets his place in our conversation. He concentrates on listening. He tells me he hears their hooves against the winter-hardened earth, and promises after this mess, he will find every horse. “Can you hear them?” I listen for their gallop, their burst-fire footsteps, but only hear pumice falling through the rainforest, leaving ash on the canopy’s leaves like muddy fingerprints. He hands me the horse’s reigns while he rolls a cigarette. As the earth reclaims the falling sky, I lose the rhythm of her steps behind me.

“Which horse is this?” I ask.

“Allende,” he says. “My favorite horse.”

“And her child?”

“This is bad luck, to say it.” He waves smoke. “If I do, we risk stillborn.”

I look back at Allende. From head-on, she appears to have swallowed a boat. I walk next to her and place my hand gently against the hull of her ribs, search for a second heartbeat. I find none. “You say you worked with birds. Which aviary did you work with? My uncle worked with hawks in Santiago.”

“I never said birds,” he steps on his shortened cigarette. The road descends into a rocky valley. Moist green slips between knuckled rock in the gorge ahead of us. The boulders, pitted stone, house termites. Allende licks at the insects as we pass. Oscar takes a drink from his canteen. “I said I worked with wings. Not birds. I was a plane mechanic for years, until the Americans came. Then I left.” He secures the canteen to a leather pack on Allende’s back. Her front knees tremble with the angled weight of our descent.

Soon the next ridge flattens out. Men in uniform call to us with hands like fences. Enforcing borders. Idling lorries block the road ahead. The ghosts from Oscar’s horses trail through the forest behind us. Soon, thick fog covers the road. One soldier takes Allende. Oscar protests but another pushes us into the back of a truck, filled with our distant neighbors. “This is an evacuation,” he yells. “We’re helping you.”

Oscar tenses his body in protest. “What of Allende? What of my horse?” But the soldier forces him in and waves us off. The trucks motor away, leaving her pregnant body shivering unprotected in the open valley’s wind. “What will happen to Allende? What of her child?” We watch as Oscar’s horse disappears in the silt of descending skies.

Oscar holds his head between trout-white palms. I keep my eyes trained on the tree line behind us, searching for the smoke-signal breath of horses. I will help Oscar look for Allende after Puyehue finishes. We will search the earth for her shipwrecked vessel, exhume the body for another burial. Still, for every young colt I’ll see, I’ll wonder, “Is this Allende’s?” Born from the womb of the earth, born slick with the sweat of labor. I’ll wonder, “Can we catch him?” Our countless fingers sticky with sweat and soil.

Oscar later tells me no, we cannot catch him, the nameless colt. Every now and then I see him between the trees, but when I get there, ash covers every imprint. When I turn around again, ash covers every step home.

-Mason Schoen is a creative writing graduate student.

-This work of fiction does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec.