Yasha sat by my grandmother's pear tree and thought deeply about the world and people's struggles.

Yasha had spent his whole life on my family's farm. I had raised him here. He knew of nothing else and only could guess what a city was from the stories I would tell him. Yasha worked hard. He helped me in the fields all he could, but he would often get distracted, wandering off chasing some butterfly or the call of a little bird from the woods. But Yasha never wandered too far. He always skipped right back after he noticed that he’d left me working by myself. He was my little tail and would almost never leave my side. While I walked, he would follow just a step behind, and sometimes if he wasn’t paying attention, he would gently poke me with his horns. Every time I let out a little yelp, but every time I would feel guilty for verbalising this pain as an overly apologetic expression would glisten in his eyes for the rest of the day. Yasha had the most beautiful eyes. They weren’t a brilliant blue or a deep golden hazel, they were black. But his eyes weren’t just black, this black talked even if he couldn’t. It would sparkle a little brighter when I told him an interesting story. Yasha’s eyes were more human than my own. They were his character.

Yasha loved my stories. Over the past couple years, we had spent all our breaks from toiling in the fields, sitting under the pear tree that Granny, may her soul rest in peace, had planted in her youth. The tree was big now. Well… big enough to bear fruit. Its shade at midday would comfortably cloak Yasha and I from the unremitting sun. Yasha enjoyed nearly all the genres of my storytelling, but Magical Realism was clearly his favourite. Yasha’s tail would quiver and his fat pink lips would smile when I would begin re-telling the works of the great Gabriel García. He was our favourites. We would sit for hours under our sacred pear tree. Sometimes we would get engrossed in the Magical Realism. Sometimes the story would envelope us as the early summer flowers would float by above the talking cows. Yet as I saw the angle of our oasis’ shadow lengthen and would remember that it was time to go back to the fields, Yasha would sleepily stumble to his feet right after me without saying a word of complaint.

I could never be sure if Yasha enjoyed our time in the fields. He was quite unpredictable. Yasha would always hop around and cheerfully explore the uniform fields as if every time there was something new and exciting. There never was or maybe I simply could not see them properly. But one thing I was sure about was that every time we sat under our pear tree, he would get noticeably happier. Not physically at least. It may have been his careless and comfortably sprawled posture, his eyes which told stories in themselves, or maybe it was just the slight relaxing of his brows as he contemplated a fallen pear in the grass, just out of reach and beyond the shadows of the tree.

Generally, a flexion of his brows gave him a serious complexion, but this was just a veneer for his childish behaviour. Yasha would often jump around, unknowingly destroying freshly planted rye with his dancing hooves. At other times he could be sweet and thoughtful as he contemplated the issues of the day and would nod knowingly as I complained about the prices rises in the city and how so many people had become so poor since the crisis. He also frequently enjoyed hide and seek. He would crouch as low as he could on his short muscular legs and look at the ground, burying his face in the thick grass, thinking that all of his 1100 kilograms of pure charisma was hidden. But he never hid well.

Except for one day. I turned around to start telling him another of Marquez’s stories about the Buendía family, a family not unlike my own, but he wasn’t there. I turned around. No. I turned around further. He wasn’t there. No trace of him leaving. Surprisingly, no sound either. Yasha had vanished without saying a word.