Belong to Me:: Stories

The common presence of horses--blue-dappled and porcelain, randy, imaginary and fleet--links the nine stories in this haunting, sad, indelible collection. In the eerie ""Blue Horse,"" a kidnapped girl speaks with disarming simplicity of her imprisonment in a man's rank, food-stained apartment, and of her truck-stop prostitution, her alienation from her pious family and the love, disgust and terror she comes to feel for her captor. In an act of overwhelming symbolism that recurs later in an altered form, the girl flees, releasing as she goes her equine double: an ancient, ghostlike blue horse, its teeth stained to ruin by a steady diet of wild oranges. ""Switch"" is the story of a racehorse trainer caught between two lives: one with the mistress he loves, the other with the wife who rescued him from a dead-end existence. At an exquisitely lonely highway rest stop, he meets a man who wants to buy a horse, helps a child gospel star cope with a nosebleed and negotiates a painful passage between the two women who anchor him. The memorable ""Rain,"" meanwhile, ends with a jarring, brutal twist on an oft-told tale of job loss and drunken despair. Maristed (Out After Dark; Fall) writes with honesty and precision about the love that sustains a horse-raising couple, a boy's troubled adoration for his mother, and a child of divorce who loses faith in the toy horses she collects. Finally, the success of these impeccable stories rests on the connection between humans and horses, on sympathy between species that speaks of what is brutish and gentle in all of us. (Feb.)