Fischer

Cotton Candy

By Jennifer Fischer

Content warning: Sexual assault

I was 5 when I cast my first spell. And 45 when I found out it worked.

I gathered up Cotton Candy, Butterscotch, Blue Bell, Minty, and Blossom, the last My Little Ponies in my collection, dumped them on the floor of the small attic space attached to my bedroom closet, and got to work.

I never wanted to see these toy horses again. Never wanted to touch or ride any horse again. I needed to banish them from existence. The attic was mostly empty. My parents used the garage for storage, with our cars in the driveway. The attic was my sacred space: a place of make-believe and magic.

I circled the small space five times, tapping the floor with a twirling baton until I found a floorboard that seemed loose. I pulled on the board to reveal the soft, dangerous pink insulation below. This was perfect. I knew to avoid it; this cotton candy-esque stuff could harm, mangle a person's insides. I'd been warned, but these pink shreds of danger were exactly what I wanted for my pastel ponies. I dropped them all onto the fibers below and stomped on the floorboard, five times, hiding any evidence. I circled the attic five times again, backwards, and left the horses and the memory of what they represented behind.

I am sick by the time we reach the horse ranch, as is always the case when we drive from Oklahoma to Missouri to see my mom's relatives or friends. The roads are windy and my dad drives too fast. My head, dotted with almost-white-blond pigtails, hangs out the window of the back of our Ford station wagon. We pull off the state highway and up a short driveway. A new gray ranch house with brick accents sits on the right, a horse barn on the left. A riding arena spreads out behind both.

Almost immediately, the kids scramble out to the back. What could be more exciting than a riding arena and horses? Four kids in all: two for each family, as it should be in white middle-class America. The oldest among us is James, 12, my mom's good friend's eldest son. James's brother and my sibling, K.T., fall somewhere in between. I am the youngest at 5. James wrangles the three younger children the way he wrangles the horses: with ease and a commanding air. As K.T. climbs atop a dark brown American Quarter Horse that I wish were pink like Cotton Candy, a wave of jealousy rushes over me. Being the baby, I always go last and am eager for my turn. K.T.'s first two passes around the arena are smooth, slow and cautious. On the third pass, James urges the horse and K.T. to go faster and then James intentionally startles the horse, causing her to buck, sending my sibling sailing through the air and landing, face first, in a pile of manure. James doesn't try to stifle his laughter. I turn away and refuse to ride, rushing back to the ranch house instead.

The house feels cluttered to me, every surface covered in horses, cowboys, lassos. Jill beams with pride. My mom savors the companionship of her dear friend. Sweet tea sits between them with a lemon wedge on the pitcher's rim, but a can of Diet Coke sweats in front of my mother, who doesn't like iced tea. A platter of pigs in a blanket sits out on a counter, presumably for the kids, while a four-pack of chocolate Jell-o pudding cups rests beside it. I ignore both and, instead, take a red apple from a plastic pink fruit bowl that sits on the counter beside the fridge.

I slide down the long hallway to the boys' bedroom, tossing the apple gently back and forth between my two small hands. Since the rest of the kids are still outside, I dig Cotton Candy out of my Jansport backpack and sneak her into the pile of blankets that will become my bed later that night, and then curl up in the corner of the bedroom to eat my apple in peace.

That evening, the kids are sent to bed early, and we struggle to sleep as the grownups laugh and chat on the back porch. The dads drink Coors Light. The moms sip hot tea. I fall asleep first as James whispers in the dark, telling a bedtime story to the other kids, careful not to alert the grownups to the fact that they are still awake.

I'm woken hours later by James. He crawls over to me. I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend to sleep, my flat chest barely moving beneath an oversized t-shirt. A thick red blanket, which I lay on top of, denotes my bed. A light-weight white blanket rests on top of me. James lifts up the thin layer of cotton that protects me and reaches inside, tugging at my pink panties. I try to push his hands away. I beg him to stop, but he persists. Pulling and poking, then placing my right hand on his penis. Forcing me to rub it, up and down, up and down. Tears stream down my face as my left hand finds Cotton Candy, hidden beneath the blankets. I clutch her hard, turning my knuckles snow white. I cry out some more and beg, again, for him to stop. But he doesn't. He's not finished yet. All the while, K.T. and James's brother remain fast asleep: undisturbed, unaware. What spell did James cast over them at bedtime?

Hours later, I think, but probably just minutes, James crawls back into his own bed. I wait as long as I can, hoping he has fallen asleep, and walk down the long hallway and into the guest bedroom. I wake my mother and ask to sleep with them, but am turned away. I go to the bathroom instead and step onto a small stool kept by the sink so that I can see myself in the mirror. I stare intensely at the little girl in the looking glass and will myself to disappear, to turn invisible. However, the longer I stare, the clearer my reflection becomes: pink puffy eyes, messy blonde bed head, invisible manure smeared across my ghost-like face.

I didn't remember what the house looked like. My mom described it to me 40 years later because I asked. She'd known about James since I was 15, when I finally remembered everything and realized that what happened was not my shame, but his. When I told my family, K.T. was devastated at not hearing my cries, at not waking up and stopping James. My mom was guilt-ridden at not having let me crawl into bed that night, and my dad never forgave himself for not knowing, for not understanding that when I begged to sleep with them the next night, I was asking him to protect me, that I needed to be kept safe.

I believed we visited that horse ranch again the next summer and perhaps the summer after that. James's probing fingers and insistent hands were an invasive species swarming over my childhood. Jill was one of my mom's best friends. She lived near my mom's favorite grandmother. Our frequent summer trips to Missouri must have meant visiting both of these people whom my mom loved.

But, when I turned 45 and finally asked my mother what she remembered about those summers, asked her what James's house looked like, asked how many summers we visited, her answer shocked me, and my mind called forth five My Little Ponies buried in pink fiberglass in an attic in Oklahoma.

"Once," she answered. "We only went that one summer. I'd hoped to go back the next summer, to make it a tradition. But you were insistent. You didn't want to go. There was something in the way you told us. You were only five, but something in your voice was strong and clear, so we never went back again."

I couldn't reply; my heart stuck in my throat. For forty years, I believed a powerful story, a story in which I was helpless, but now I could release that story and replace it with a new story because now there was Truth: I was not helpless. Perhaps I did not stop James that sticky summer night so many years ago, but that didn't mean that I was powerless. When I returned to my safe place, I buried a set of beloved pastel ponies and banished the gray-brick horse ranch from my life forever.

We moved out of the house with the attic when I was ten, left Oklahoma and went south. I spent the next eight years in Central Texas in a house without an attic, the five toy horses long forgotten. Decades later, my parents divorced. My mom remarried, and in a strange twist of fate, her new husband's son lived in my childhood home with the fiberglass and the horses and the attic. Recently, my mom brought me a large plastic bag containing five My Little Ponies.

"Were these yours?" she asked. Her husband's son had found them when they were putting new insulation in the attic.

"Yeah. Those were mine." I replied.

"I thought so," she said. "Do you want them?"

"Yes," I was surprised to hear myself say.

At midnight, I carry those My Little Ponies into the backyard where an old dryer drum, often used as a firepit, awaits. A full moon shines down on the toy horses as I drop them into the silver-lined drum, releasing Cotton Candy last. I circle the silver cylinder five times before dousing the ponies with gasoline and setting them on fire. The acrid smell of burning plastic fills the air as blue and yellow flames dance together; the flames multiplying in the drum's reflective surface. My heartbeat steadies with each breath of release, with each hour that passes through this long dark night.

Thousands of miles away, in Missouri, James, now a renowned horse trainer, wakes at five a.m. to start his day. He sips coffee that his wife prepared even earlier that morning, sets a tan Stetson on top of his brown hair. Jeans, a plaid collared shirt and understated leather boots complete his look. He likes to have these early mornings to himself, to ride his favorite mare before the official workday on the ranch begins.

In the barn, he approaches the mare, a gentle American White, with tenderness and ease, a familiar routine existing between them. Per usual, he starts to put the bridle on her in preparation for their daily morning ride, but as he slides his wind-chapped hands down her head and begins to insert the bit into her ruddy pink mouth, the mare rears unexpectedly. Her hooves connect to flesh and send him, startled and shocked, into a pile of manure at the edge of her stall. Before he can rise out of the stench, she bolts through the gray barn doors and toward the yellow field outside of the riding arena. As the sun's rays begin to spread over the horizon, the mare accelerates, her champagne tail dancing in the wind behind her. She pushes hard and picks up enough speed to vault over the arena's fence with ease. She gallops through the waiting field and toward the tree line stretched out ahead of her. The early morning sky bounces off of her shiny almost-white-blond coat, turning it a cotton candy pink. She enters the forest at the ranch's edge and disappears from view, finally free.

Jennifer Fischer is a writer/creator whose films have been featured by NBC, ABC, Univision, Fusion, etc. Her writing has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Literary Mama, Barzakh Magazine and others. She has an essay in What is a Criminal? Answers from Inside the U.S. Justice System from Routledge Press and pieces in other anthologies, including Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness, winner of the 2024 IndieReader Discovery Award. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her life partner, two children, and a teacup chihuahua.