The metallic taste of blood in her mouth was the first thing Jes noticed when she woke up. Her head felt as though it had shattered to pieces and been put together with barbed wire. She groaned as she opened her eyes. The bright light of dawn burned and she squinted against it. For a moment, she wondered where she was, what had happened. Then she remembered. The black horse.

“Fuck,” She croaked, her voice thick and rough. Her chest ached where the seatbelt had caught her, blood caked her face from where the airbag had given her a bloody nose. She tumbled out of the car clumsily and stood in the road, surveying the damage. She swayed and rocked as she stood, barely managing to stay on her feet. Her poor car was totaled. The front end smashed beyond recognition. Somehow she had escaped with not much more than bruises, but the car was beyond repair.

“Fuck,” she said again as she walked unsteadily toward the front of the car. Dark blood stained the road, a pool of it that told her everything she needed to know about the condition of the horse she had hit. Its sleek, black, form was crumpled and broken in front of the vehicle. She was lucky it hadn't gone over the hood. The poor thing had hit the car head-on, charged the vehicle in its last moments.

Its neck was broken, head bent at an odd angle, its shining, obsidian horn aimed at the car. Both of its front legs had broken as well, knees backwards and cloven hooves splayed far apart. Wait, what the hell? Jes sat down on the highway, her mind suddenly blank.

That wasn’t a horse.

Maybe she had hit her head far harder than she thought. She reached up to touch her forehead, where the pain seemed concentrated. There was blood matted in her brown curls. Beneath her copper-colored freckles, her skin was pale and clammy. Dried blood flecked her upper lip and her chin, where the blood from her nose had dried.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat in the road next to the dead thing. Even in her mind she refused to name it. It occurred to her she should have called the police or her mother or someone. Maybe she was hallucinating.

Or dead.

Maybe she was dead. Or dying. She could be dying, in the car. Hitting a horse at 55 miles per hour wasn’t exactly something it was easy to walk away from. She was definitely dying, she decided as she stared at the black blood that was no longer bleeding out of the not-horse. She tried to stand up, but her trembling legs wouldn’t support her. Instead she crawled to the open drivers door and tried to find her phone. It wasn’t where it had been, the accident had clearly thrown it about in the car.

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She was sitting back down on the ground, next to her totaled car, her eyes half closed and her thoughts chasing themselves in circles, she should call someone. But where’s the phone? In the car, she should look for it in the car. But she couldn’t force herself to get up. An oppressive lethargy seemed to have overtaken her. She couldn’t get her thoughts in order, couldn’t get her body to do quite what she wanted. She felt heavy and numb.

The bright sun had almost cleared the horizon, turning the fields of harvest-ready corn golden, when she saw a tractor driving slowly down the road from the direction she had come. She blinked and suddenly it had stopped behind her mangled car and the driver was crouched next to her.

“You okay, miss?” His voice was warm and he sounded concerned.

Jes shook her head slowly. “No. I hit a.. Horse.”

“A horse?” Suddenly his voice was even more concerned. “Ma’am, you’re lucky to be in one piece if you hit a horse.” He already had his phone out, pressed to his ear as he rose to his feet, walking toward the front of the car.

She could hear him talking to the person on the other end of the line, giving them the location of the accident. Then she watched the phone fall from his hand as he rounded the front of the car. “What in God’s name is that?”

“A horse?” She ventured hopefully.

His expression was indescribable as he looked down at the dead animal in front of the car then back at her. “I don’t think so.” His voice was choked as he took a step away from the carcass. His foot scuffed against the phone, sending it back toward Jes and she heard the tiny, tinny voice on the other end calling out.

He stared down at whatever she had hit for a long, silent moment, before he turned away and picked up the phone. “We’re fine.” He said into the phone as he put it up to his ear, “Well, I am anyway.” One hand went through his unkempt, blond hair as he huffed out a breath. “She’s pretty banged up.”

“I don’t think I broke anything.” She said, squinting against the ever brightening sunlight.

“Probably a concussion.” He said into the phone as he looked down at her. His blue eyes were serious, but she could see the unease in them as he kept glancing toward the front of the car. “Yeah, I’ll stay with her until the ambulance gets here.”

He finally sat down next to her, setting the phone on speaker between them. “They want me to stay on the line until the ambulance shows up.”

“They always do.” She murmured.

“Have a lot of experience with 911, do you?” He asked, trying a smile.

“More than I’d like.” She admitted, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “I’ve got a blanket in the back seat. Can you get it for me? I’m cold.”

It was a surprisingly short time before the emergency vehicles arrived and she was bundled into the ambulance and headed for town. As the ambulance drove off, she realized she hadn’t thanked the farmer for his help or even asked his name.