Trying Fourleggedness

The boy and the girl were mostly gesture, a clouded outline, the pencil lifting, lowering to get at the idea of childhood, not the sour milk and scraped knee of it. Her skirt was a swoop of ink, his hand invisible in an undrawn pocket. Circles make up the majority of the face. We are all circles and planar suggestion. If  the girl wants to be a horse she need only walk into the outline of one and line up her body with the chest. We’ll fill in the rest, and before you know it, she’s a natural. Who will ride her? The boy doesn’t know how. He has a hankering to sketch in a saddle. When she tosses her head, he mocks up a bridle. He mocks her. A bridle for a bride, he says, which doesn’t seem like what little boys say, but he wasn’t so little, and she didn’t run away.