Eadweard Muybridge motions

 

An older piece of something I found today while I was working on some fiction. Well it is fiction as well, I can't remember why I wrote it, but I remembered looking at these photos. 

Muybridgean Reanimation

 “Muybridge’s stop-motion technique was an early form of animation that helped pave the way for the motion-picture industry, born a short decade later.”

The work horse was Daddy’s favorite, that’s why he let that man take the pictures. The horse wasn’t just Daddy’s favorite horse or Daddy’s favorite animal on the farm. The horse was his favorite of anything in the world: me, Mama, the farm. When the man came with the camera, Daddy took the horse out and brushed him ‘til his dappled hide looked like marble. He even took his Sunday handkerchief, the one Mama washed and ironed, and wiped the horse’s nose. Mama cried when I brought it back to the house and told her what he did.

When the man asked Papa to put the collar on the horse and work him, Papa smiled, winked at me and started telling the man what a good horse he had. I stood in the background, breathing in the stale warmth of the leather and how when Daddy put the bit in the horse’s mouth his tongue made the snaffle click like gooseberries hitting the pail. The horse turned to look at me, like he was saying, “Hey, what do you do around here?”

I knew I didn’t do much, Mama said the fever hurt my heart and I needed to stay out of the sun and stay cool and not strain too much. Daddy didn’t like me because I couldn’t work, and he thought less of Mama ‘because she couldn’t give him boys. The horse was his worker and his son. He sometimes stayed the night in the barn when Mama talked too much, her loneliness driving him away.

The man with the camera asked Daddy to walk the horse across the barn. He rigged lots of lights and then started taking picture after picture. Daddy was a smiling monkey, if he’d had a tail he would have swung over the beams and hooted; he would move us out of the house and the horse in if he could. The man with the camera said. “That’s all I need” and he told Daddy to take the horse back outside.

While he was gone the man with the camera looked at me. “What’s your story?” he asked, like girls my age shouldn’t still be at home or at least not hanging out in a barn, watching their father parade his plow horse as if it was Joe Cotton. I dipped my head and told him I was too sick to work, too sick to marry. He asked if I wanted my picture taken, make an impression that would last forever. This like I was important. I guess I nodded, okay.

He had props: dresses, fans, hats and a parasol. He tells me I can pick what I want. I step into the granary and change into a long white gown, it feels like sugar, it’s lighter than cheesecloth and swishes and waves as I walk. When I return, the man with the camera takes the mop of my hair in his hand, up close he smells like cumin and lye. He twists my hair over my head, and somehow, it stays in place. Then he tells me to walk.

I start to walk, holding the dress on one side, to keep from tripping and I don’t want the dress dragging where the cows walk every day. It’s hot and the flies follow me, even in the new outfit. The man tosses me a fan, I walk and wave the fan over my head, a one-armed bird. That’s when Daddy returns, his horse on the lead behind him and they both startle at me in the white dress. The man with the camera stops taking pictures, turns to him and says, “These will be an important addition, thousands of people will see these pictures.”

So that’s how it happened, that years after we both have died, I’m stuck with the big, dumb horse walking through the barn over and over again; stuck in eternity with my father’s favorite.