[Phase #2]- Drawin’ Conculsions

Part II: Drawin’ Conculsions

She started calling me something else.

Not 8807.
Not “it.”
Not a number that clung like a bruise to the inside of my ears.

“Drawin’ Conculsions,” she murmured one morning, her fingers brushing the top rail of the wooden fence while I lingered just beyond the range of her shadow. “Because every mark on you tells a story. And someday, you’ll write the ending.”

She called me Sharpie for short.

I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t feel sharp. I felt hollow and rubbed down, like the part of a bit that cuts the tongue when the horse stops pulling. I felt like a question no one wanted answered. But each time she said that name, her voice landed softer. It didn’t press—it drew something forward. Gently.

That night, the moon was high and pale behind a gauze of clouds. Crickets buzzed low in the grass, and barn lights spilled golden squares across the yard. I watched her again from the shadows—my usual post, half-tucked behind a cedar with its trunk still damp from the afternoon sprinkle.

She came like she always did. No rope. No expectations. Just a steady rhythm in her boots and a rhythm in her breath. She climbed up onto the second rail of the wooden fence, perched like she’d been born to balance between patience and purpose. The old leather-bound journal sat in her lap, the kind that creaked when it opened, the kind that looked like it had heard more truths than it told.

Her boots tapped once against the wood before she stilled, pen poised.

“Journal Entry. June 20,” she began, her voice steady and low.
“She let me sit within six feet of her today. Didn’t pin her ears. Watched me the whole time. I told her I’d call her Sharpie. Not because she’s broken. Because she’s bold. Permanent. A truth you can’t erase.”

She tapped the pen once against her knee. A moth fluttered near the porch light and thudded softly against the wood siding.

“She looks like she’s drawing conclusions of her own—studying everything, figuring out what’s safe, what’s not. There’s thought behind her eyes. Like she’s rewriting every truth she’s ever been taught. That name didn’t come from me—it came from watching her think.”

I didn’t know what a journal was. But the words hung in the air like the scent of warm grain—unexpected, oddly safe.

The air carried the gentle smells of cedar, clover, and distant rain, curling through the wooden rails. A horse down in the barn stamped and snorted, settling for the night. A dog barked once, half-heartedly, then went quiet again. And I listened.

That name—Sharpie—kept brushing against my ears like a leaf catching the wind. It felt like something that might stick, not out of force, but out of choice.

I still flinched when the wind changed. I still tracked the shadows longer than I looked at her face.

But her voice didn’t carry threat. And the name she gave me?
It didn’t weigh me down.

It lifted me just a little.

And that night, curled beneath the low branches at the edge of the paddock, I dreamed—not of gates or ropes or running.

I dreamed of her voice.

And in the dream, she said my name.