(This little one was published on 7 September 2018 by The Drabble–Gotta love them Ponies–Leila)
Beyond the barren rubble of an antique lava-flow, a herd of Icelandic ponies graze on rough pasturage among rashes and dwarf birch. A stallion sniffs the breeze; mares and foals snuffle among the grass and herbs. The stirring and shifting of their manes and tails seem all of a piece with the jagged mountain silhouettes on the horizon and the jumbled lava – a wild, young, restless country. I turn to Guðmundur: ‘Those horses … they’re almost an emblem of freedom.’
Guðmundur paused, smiled and shook his head: ‘My grandfather made his living selling them to work down the Scottish mines.’
Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).
Saragun Springs 
Hi Mick
This one was a bit of a pill to get transferred to WP (their fault, no one else’s) but definitely worth it. I hope the Ponies show well to all!
Leila
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Thanks for another resurrection, Leila. The original (now defunct) publisher only accepted 100-word pieces. I wrote it after Doreen and I had been on holiday in Iceland – a wonderful and strange place, which led me afterwards to write several pieces.
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Mick
This is a totally beautiful and wildly cool picture of these ponies. The prose here works really well, also. It’s a fully fleshed-out flash fiction in a brief space. Simple yet with a profound message, all the more effective for being unstated.
Jane Morris must have been quite a character in the flesh, in order to have inspired paintings of Beatrice, Iseult, etc. Rossetti made her look like a goddess. I read one account of the situation that said William was very well aware of what was going on between his wife and his best friend, Dante. Perhaps he, like Percy Bysshe Shelley before him, did not believe in the impossible rigors and the societal law of monogamy. (It seems clear that Jane and Dante did not believe in it.) In the end, too, it seems like none of these three let the situation blow up into a lot of useless and histrionic drama. Perhaps they were the precursors of the kind, good-hearted, and generous Leopold Bloom, who knows full well what his wife Molly is up to, but doesn’t believe in jealousy and loves her and lives with her anyway.
Dale
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Thanks for commenting, Dale. Glad you liked the piece. You probably know that Iceland was settled by ‘refugees’ from Norway more than a thousand years agio, fleeing from what they saw as an oppressive Norwegian king. They established an annual national assembly to make and agree the laws, and to judge crimes – an early model of a democratic state. But it was also a society with slaves. I wanted to write something about freedom and its limits.
No-one knows for sure, but I’m of the same opinion as you re Morris and Jane: as a very atypical Victorian, Morris didnt feel he had the right to curb his wife’s choice of partner.
bw mick
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Rampant misapprehension.
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